The NYT art critic wrote an elaborate review of the new Whitney Biennial. The review was published 4 days ago. It has a comments section. There isn't one comment.

Here. See for yourself.

That's some amazing apathy. I'm sure the critic, Holland Cotter, said some provocative things. I mean, I scanned the text and looked for something. I was thinking maybe...

As the curators have emphasized in statements about the show, the idea of boundaries, and getting rid of them, were important to their thinking about this biennial, starting with questions (also addressed by the 2019 edition) of how to break down the geopolitical borders that have traditionally defined and delimited the Whitney’s version of “American art.” 

The idea of boundaries, and getting rid of them.... 

You know what's a boundary? A museum. We're just not traditionally defined and delimited enough to care.

"Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions..."

"1. An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities; 2. A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; 3. The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel)."

Wrote Milan Kundera in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" (1979), quoted at the Wikipedia entry "Graphomania." "Graphomania" is a word I looked up after writing the previous post, about Mr. Doodle.

What if anything distinguishes obsessive writing from obsessive drawing? I don't know, but back in 2005 there was a show called "Obsessive Drawing" at The American Folk Art Museum. Holland Cotter wrote about it in the NYT: 

The act of drawing and painting, [one artist said], helped to ease a debilitating anxiety that had dogged him all his life. Once he started a drawing, the anxiety lifted. Relief arrived as a state of entrancement. One minute he'd be sitting at his kitchen table with sheets of graph paper and a pen filled with ink. The next, he'd be aware that hours had passed, and he'd done a drawing. What was the mechanism responsible? He's not sure, but it worked for a creative half century....

"[T]he expanded MoMA is making obvious efforts to reshape its image without going entirely off-brand — to tell the tale of what might be called Modernism Plus, with globalism and African-American art added...."

"The first gallery, now labeled '19th Century Innovators,' is pretty much a painting hit parade — Cezanne’s 'Still Life with Apples' (1895-98), Rousseau’s 'The Sleeping Gypsy' (1897) and, straight ahead, van Gogh’s 'The Starry Night' (1889).... But to this familiar two-dimensional European world MoMA has introduced an American wild card: half a dozen nugget-like ceramic bowls and jugs by George Ohr (1857-1918), the self-proclaimed 'Mad Potter of Biloxi.'... The gallery [that is] a virtual Picasso shrine, with his 1907 'Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon' at the center, and related pictures ranged around it [includes]... a 1967 painting, acquired in 2016, by the African-American artist Faith Ringgold depicting an explosive interracial shootout. Titled 'American People Series #20: Die,' it speaks to 'Demoiselles' both in physical size and in visual violence. And just by being there it points up the problematic politics of a work like Picasso’s — with its fractured female bodies and colonialist appropriations — that is at the core of the collection. MoMA traditionalists will call the pairing sacrilegious; I call it a stroke of curatorial genius.... Multicultural is now marketable. To ignore it is to forfeit profit, not to mention critical credibility."

Writes Holland Cotter in "MoMA Reboots With ‘Modernism Plus’/If they moved Monet, don’t despair. There are stimulating ideas and unexpected talents at every turn, from Africa, Asia, South America, and African America. (And plenty of works by women.)" (NYT).

"If you are affected — moved, amused, provoked — by the assembled Hayes oeuvre, then is it art?"

Holland Cotter asks:

Are Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett artists?... Are they themselves perpetrators of a scam? Or are they critical thinkers working in an alternative direction to the market economy?...

Is it an example of the white art world — Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett are white — getting mileage out of the work of a black artist, real or not?

"A rush of generalized nostalgia, a soft-centered melancholy."

Holland Cotter opines on Edward Hopper:

To me he's a period illustrator with something extra. Like most effective graphic design, his pictures grab the eye, spark an emotion and get into your system, all in a flash. But too often the first look is the best look, and the first emotion — with Hopper, a rush of generalized nostalgia, a soft-centered melancholy — the only one. It's an experience; it's not nothing. I just wish it were more.

That's a well-inserted dagger.