IF THE latest Whitney Biennial does nothing else, it signals the revival of certain artistic ambitions that were dormant if not dead through most of the Eighties and early Nineties. It has restored to us the obligation of looking at the art of our contemporaries as if there were at least the potential, if not yet the reality, of true artistic achievement. And it has restored to us the possibility of once again applying certain critical yardsticks which, as recently as two years ago, would have seemed ludicrously beside the point.
The curator of this exhibition, Klaus Kertess, has taste. Surely it is neither infallible nor exempt from several of the toxic pseudodoxies of the day. What is important is that he should have any taste at all, since this commodity has not been highly regarded around the Whitney in recent years and was entirely absent from the last Biennial. That exhibition, under curator Elisabeth Sussman, was the most political in the history of the institution. Of over eighty artists included, the number of straightforward painters and sculptors could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In choosing Kertess for the present exhibition, the Whitney seems to have recoiled from the rampant extremism in which it was so recently complicit.
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