This year’s Whitney Biennial shows how America’s elite institutions are stifling innovation and creativity.
I was on the whole disappointed by this year’s Whitney Biennial — it was hard for me to tell if one video installation was art or an HR training video — but as an economist, I have to admit the exhibition was successful in at least one respect: It did what art is supposed to do, which is to hold up a mirror to our society and economy. And this year’s biennial shows how America’s elite institutions are stifling innovation and creativity.
The theme of this year’s show was to use artificial intelligence and the “rhetoric around gender and authenticity” to “explore the permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds.” I liked some of it, but I was not alone in my disappointment. Some critics also complained that much of it was predictable and risk-averse.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images
