Undefinitive

New York’s Whitney Museum will spend the summer saluting the Bicentennial with a full-scale display of American sculpture, from the Indians to now. The show fills the entire building, four floors plus the pit-like open space in front. It’s exhausting—and underwhelming.

The idea of such a show must have seemed like a natural. No such historical survey had been done in years, although American sculpture, especially in recent .decades, has become increasingly important; moreover, there was a kind of poetic justice about it since the Whitney’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was herself a sculptor (though not of sufficient note, apparently, to be included here). The clincher must have been the sure appeal of such a project to corporate givers who love sponsoring anything labeled “definitive.” The fact that its catalogue would be designed as a “standard work” (that’s what all exhibition catalogues aim at these days, with non-PhD’d curators trying to prove that they can amass footnotes as well as any professor) and would be big (it weighs in at five pounds on my bathroom scale) made it even more attractive, since the generosity of the subsidizer, Chase Manhattan, could be immortalized forever on the title page.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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New York’s Whitney Museum will spend the summer saluting the Bicentennial with a full-scale display of American sculpture, from the Indians to now. The show fills the entire building, four floors plus the pit-like open space in front. It’s exhausting—and underwhelming.

The idea of such a show must have seemed like a natural. No such historical survey had been done in years, although American sculpture, especially in recent .decades, has become increasingly important; moreover, there was a kind of poetic justice about it since the Whitney’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was herself a sculptor (though not of sufficient note, apparently, to be included here). The clincher must have been the sure appeal of such a project to corporate givers who love sponsoring anything labeled “definitive.” The fact that its catalogue would be designed as a “standard work” (that’s what all exhibition catalogues aim at these days, with non-PhD’d curators trying to prove that they can amass footnotes as well as any professor) and would be big (it weighs in at five pounds on my bathroom scale) made it even more attractive, since the generosity of the subsidizer, Chase Manhattan, could be immortalized forever on the title page.