A Year in the Art World by Matthew Israel

Author:Matthew Israel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

A week after meeting with Rugoff, I am back in New York, walking west along 14th Street towards The Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney, designed by superstar architect Renzo Piano and opened to the public in 2015, sits on the waterfront next the Hudson River and capitalizes on the immense popularity of the High Line. It is still one of the newest and most exciting spaces for contemporary art in New York.

I’m heading to The Whitney to meet with two other curators of a major 2019 biennial – Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, co-curators of the next Whitney Biennial. This is the most anticipated biennial exhibition of contemporary art in America, regarded (as Venice is in relation to the world) as the major statement of what is happening in American art. Other museums in the US have biennials and triennials, but they are not solely focused on American art, and because of its history and connection to a major museum, the Whitney Biennial is regarded as one of the most important biennial exhibitions in the world.58 Hundreds of artists have gotten their breaks thanks to the Biennial, which was first held in 1932. It’s a safe bet that again this year the artist list will be hotly anticipated and acted upon by the art market and the art press – which, as with Venice, loves to use it to engage collectors.

Alongside the excitement of the show, the Whitney Biennial is notorious for attracting criticism – maybe because its unusual domestic focus, and its inherent aim to encapsulate what American art is right now, provide commentators with a ripe opportunity for making analogies about what is wrong with the country. (This has led it to be characterized by past curators as an ‘imperfect mirror’.) The Biennial also frequently becomes an occasion for reflection on the unequal demographics of the American art world; the choice of artists in terms of race, gender and representation of any kind is always pored over and subjected to debate, discussion and sometimes protest. In 1987, the Guerrilla Girls protested the show’s sexism – only 24 per cent of that year’s artists were women – as well as its racism. The 2015 biennial was criticized for the fact that out of 118 participants there were only thirty-eight women, only nine of whom were black. In 2017, an open letter addressed to the museum asking that the painting Open Casket by Dana Schutz be destroyed spurred anger and protest on both sides. The painting depicted Emmett Till, the African American teenager whose lynching in 1955 galvanized civil rights activism of the era; the incident had come back into the news in recent years because of the wrongful deaths of other young African Americans including Trayvon Martin, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. On one side, critics of Schutz (a white woman) challenged her right to appropriate such a freighted historical image; on the other side, supporters viewed the painting in the context of Schutz’s work and defended her right to free speech.

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