As you may have noticed, I’ve more or less discontinued the “irreverent photo essay” posts on my blog, in favor of tweeting (with images) my fleeting, flitting impressions of certain shows and events. I find the punchy, pointed Twitter format particularly suited to quick takes on the vast agglomerations of unrelated material encountered at art fairs and biennials.
For the first time on CultureGrrl (a late adopter of all things technological), I’ve assembled below my 11 tweet-takes on the Whitney Biennial, arranged here in proper (rather than reverse) chronological order, via Storify.
To these short takes on a long show (which opens to the public tomorrow), I would only add that I think the museum’s seasoned curators may have taken their eyes off this ball, preoccupied, as they certainly must be, with the upcoming move to vast new downtown digs, scheduled to open next year. As I implied in my tweets, the three outside curators who were called in to organize this final Biennial in the Breuer building didn’t shape enough order from this chaos to create a satisfying whole.
Here are my #WhiBi 140-character (or less) snippets, transferred to CultureGrrl from @CultureGrrl, with a look at some of the works that I did admire. (I goofed with the link in my first tweet; I meant to write: @WhitneyMuseum Biennial.)
UPDATE: For a much more detailed rundown of hits and misses in this show, see Andrew Russeth‘s insightful review in the NY Observer, with an overall assessment that jibes with mine:
It is deeply dissatisfying—a wunderkammer-like, all-over-the-place show that offers some remarkable pleasures and far too many enervating frustrations.