Review of NY Times article

Title: 'At a Biennial On a Budget, Tweaking and Provoking'

Author: Holland Cotter

Date: Friday, February 26, 2010

Section: Weekend Arts: fine arts leisure; page C19, continued on C28

Though the author starts out the article by stating that the Whitney Museum of American Art was not going to be the exhibition of the century, and would in fact be quite a letdown after previous years, the article actually paints a very positive image of the museum's work thereafter. Cotter quickly points out that the museum show "lives up—or down—to its billing" and that it "has no theme; its catalog is slight; its installation, Spartan". He continues to explain that "spectacle is out" and that the exhibit is really quite bare, and boring. The exhibit is nothing special, though like anything it had its positive points, though they couldn't outweigh the negative. This negative viewpoint is established in the first three paragraphs, before Cotter abruptly about faces with all the positives of the museum exhibit. He describes the wonders of the exhibit so well that it completely belays all his previous negative comments; "And the shock they generate, in part because of the exploitive vibe they give off, ripples through everything around them. Suddenly you notice that the ceramics on Ms. Hutchinsin's sofa resemble severed limbs; that the masklike faces in a nearby sculpture by Huma Bhabha look eaten away; that the muscle-bound minotaur in a fantastically delicate drawing by Aurel Schmidt is bionic monstrosity, possible sire to Thomas Houseago's sasquatch-like 'Baby' elsewhere in the show." In actuality, it seems like the disparate comments at the beginning of the article are intended to throw the reader of course, to showcase the image that the museum gave itself. But just as the writer was surprised by the subtly of the exhibit, the way the theme and organization seems completely ill-planned at first, until the reality of it hits you, seems to be behind the way he set up the organization of the article. In order to give a true review of the art museum exhibit, in order to truly convey what it was about to the reader, he had to present his findings in the same way that he discovered them. The very last sentence of the article I think is key to understanding it, to receiving the message that the review, and the museum, was trying to convey to potential audiences. It was about an artist whose piece of art is to the reviewer the central piece to the exhibit, the one that draws all the pieces together into theme and organization, without which it would not be the same. "Mr. Asher was originally told his piece would last a week, but the museum, for budgetary reasons, has cut it back to three days, a regrettable breach of promise in a Biennial that is otherwise exactly what it said it would be."