Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

I wouldn’t really say that I’m tremendously versed in the world of art, especially contemporary art, but I know what I like, and I know what I don’t like. So for anyone who ever looked at, for instance, Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Panel and said “Oooooh…I get it…so, how about that local sports team,” I give you Sebastian Smee’s review of the Whitney Biennial from the Globe. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such utter pwnage in an art review. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such utter pwnage. The choice lines start in the second graf:

Unfortunately—and there’s no gentle way to put this—the show as a whole is a debacle. Not only is it incoherent, it is overburdened with art about art, sloppy gestures of pseudo-revolt, dreary and repetitive video art, and arcane conceptualism.

Then Smee goes after the curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari:

They are so mired in outdated academic discourse and aesthetic navel-gazing that they can no longer tell good from bad, engaging from alienating. Even when they do find good things, they fail to display them in lucid and sympathetic surroundings.

Oof. Then a series of dreadful installations that are

conceptually overloaded, politically limp, tedious, arcane—you name it.

The coda is a piece called Couch for a Long Time by Jessica Jackson Hutchins, which inspires this reaction:

You look at it, and search your memory for anything that has looked quite as arbitrary, as ugly, or as pointless.

Yikes. I won’t pontificate about contemporary movements in art, since it should be abundantly clear that I really don’t know shit. But it’s very refreshing to know that I’m not an idiot for looking at, for instance, Scott Short’s Untitled (White), and thinking “Huh?” Maybe it’s the artists who don’t know shit!