Review of Reviews-:Whitney Biennale 2014, New York

Reviews Reviewed

1. Benjamin Sutton, Artnet News, Critical Reduction: The 2014 Whitney Biennial (This is a review of 8 reviews)

2. Peter Scheldahl, The New York Times, Get With It

3. Holland Cotter, The New York Times, Last Dance in the Old Place: The Whitney Biennale has New Faces and Interesting Choices

4. Helen Molesworth, Artforum, The Whitney Biennial

5. Howard Halle, Time Out Magazine, Review: The 2014 Whitney Biennial (The Whitney Tries Something New but Ends p with the Same Old Thing)

6. Andrew Russeth, On View, The Whitney Biennial Disappoints with Misfires, Omissions and Only Glimmers of Greatness

7. Brooks Adams, Art in America, The Whitney Biennial 2014

Background information about the biennale from these critiques

• The show was held in Whitney Museum,Madison Avenue New York in 2014

• The Biennale was unique because it had three curators(Stuart Comer curator from MOMA, Anthony Elms artist and curator from The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Michelle Grabner artist and professor of painting at the School of Art Institute at Chicago) .The curators were not employees of the museum and  were from outside New York(one recently arrived)

• The three curators had three separate exhibitions on three separate floors with different approaches ,little teamwork,no institutionally sanctioned judgement(therefore out of the box perhaps) competing visions, and little commonality.The exhibition was divided between candyfloss, commerce,pop culture and the underground, attempted to please too many constituencies and in the end pleased no one in particular since the ratings of the reviewers ranged from mostly Cs to a D.
  
  

• The middle floor was curated by Stuart Comner and paid attention to the convergence of performative practices , politics,transgender identities and the show was diverse too brash or too subdued.It was diverse but experimental.
  
  The top floor was curated by Michelle Grabner and housed mainly mid career female artists, abstract expressionists, colourful artworks and mostly focused on paintings and ceramics
  
  

The bottom floor was curated by Anthony Elms whose focus was on minimalism, poetic use of space, literature and archive

40% of the artists represented were deceased , new artists were not considered, most artists had already been represented in biennales earlier.

• Most reviewers found the biennial mediocre to disappointing
  
  

My review of the reviews

• The proclivities of the reviewers were subjective ,they highlighted the reviewers’ personal likes and dislikes and were found inconsistent for instance some reviewers found the top floor curated by Michelle Grabner overcrowded ,easy on the eye,safe,old fashioned with diluted political thought (Holland Cotter, Helen Molesworth,Andrew Russeth)whereas others were infatuated with Grabner’s floor calling it the only redeeming factor, conceptually strong (Jerry Salz, Howard Halle)

One one hand

Helen Molesworthy described Grabner’s show as a “messy loft party where a few different generation of folks- picture artists , feminist painters, today’s artists, kept bumping into each other”

Andrew Russeth said” there is a mayhem on the 4th floor works rarely breathe”

on the other hand

Jerry Salz wrote "spend most of your time on the 4th floor. It includes Michelle Grabner's visual and material high point, crammed with colourful paintings, sculpture, hand made objects, ceramics, textiles and is radiating with heat and energy"

Howard Halles stated “Grabner pays close attention to the relationship between forms, there is a quietitude of forms visually and conceptually”

• The reviews were honest ,harsh and evidently unconcealed or blatant in their  likes or dislikes of artists and curators

“Anthony Elms curating is timid, public garden where things never get too wild too dangerous or too exciting”-Hrag Valtanian in Hyperalergic

“Dona Nelson messes up the surface with applications of ratty looking driplike skeins of paint soaked cheesecloth”-Holland Cotter in New York Times

or high praise was showered on some artists “especially ravishing is a shelf crowded with elegant ceramics by Shio Kusaka who inflects traditional forms with subtle idosyncratic imperfections”-Peter Schjeldahl

or curators “ Anthony Elms poetically uses empty space with the inclusion of the camera obscura installation by Zoe Leonard’s breathtakingly beautiful and hauntingly simple work”-Brook Adams

• The tone used  by  reviewers was sometimes hugely entertaining /sarcastic, deliberately funny

“the Biennale pulls you not in three but in dozens of directions plenty of which are dead ends”-Andrew Russeth

“The result is a three tiered cake of a show mostly vanilla but laced with threads of darker,sharper flavour and with lots of frosting on top”-Holland Cotter

“The show’s tributes to the dead seem telling.It is as if only dying could decisively counter today’s unholy momentum with its pressures to get with this or that program.Death suspends practice”-Peter Schjeldahl

“after a while the entire thing blurred together and the experience started to feel more like a trial of endurance one I associate with art fairs and trips to Ikea”

• The language was often “show offy” and you think “what was that again?”

“The curators’ shared impulse smacks of passive agressiveness either withholding or gingerly ironizing aesthetic pleasures”-Peter Schjeldahl

“Most of the art in the show would be remembered as especially frazzled, peculiarly melancholy Zietgeist”- Peter Schjeldah

Conclusions/Questions/Take aways

• The reviews must be taken with ladels full of salt due to different points of views and biases of different art critics.Irrespective of what the critics say the audience might want to visit an exhibition with a fresh eye, without any expectations.Similarly collectors would purchase a work not necessarily influenced by the reviews but what appeals to their sensibilities and fits their budgets.

• negative publicity is also publicity so from an artist’s point of view do not get discouraged with negative remarks by critics

• the reviewers in this case focused on critiquing the approaches of the curators their successes and failures, their selection process and arrangement of artworks in the given space

• It is to be questioned whether the views  expressed by the critics are in fact the independent views by the art critic or the stand the publication wants to take?

• what is the role of the art critic? to be vindictive for the sake of it?to be objective? to inform or simply to entertain readers