The Whitney Museum’s Biennial is still on display, sort of. It “offers a space for contemplating the shifting currents of art in the United States, asking not only what is being made but also what it means to name something “American” at all.”
The approach to the museum exhorts us to “Free Palestine” while eating Halal food:
Once inside, there is some awesome non-political art:
Sign for the above:
New Yorkers who don’t get enough of the “river to the sea liberation” message from their mayor and the assorted public gatherings can sit for 32 minutes and contemplate the displacement of Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” (I didn’t stay for the whole 32 minutes, but I have a feeling that the Arab rejection of the United Nations partition of the British territory and subsequent Arab declaration of war on the Jews wasn’t mentioned as a possible explanation for displacement; we are reminded that the Arabs who invaded the Levant during the Muslim Conquests are “indigenous”):
I’m not sure that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) would approve of the restroom signage:
If the restroom sign is haram, the mask compliance of visitors was halal:
The staff also wore masks:
Returning to the question of signage, what if an Ivy League graduate artist went around NYC removing (“stealing”, haters might say) signs that had been fabricated and mounted, at tremendous union labor expense, by office building owners? (Could the Whitney be prosecuted for receiving stolen property?) David L. Johnson says that the signs are overly restrictive, e.g., “no defecating”, but what if someone tried to do that in his living room or studio?
The smartest artist was able to get into the exhibition by applying a square of black tape to the wall:
Another way to get into the exhibit was to put a bunny suit on a doll:
If you had always been curious about “parallels between the discrimination of Okinawans and Black Americans”…
Who can infer the gas price? Is it less than $1 per gallon in this 1986 photo?
Speaking of combusting gasoline into CO2, the exhibit allows us to learn about “environmental collapse”:
(If the artist doesn’t want to be in a filthy degraded environment why does she choose to live in Philadelphia?)
If you’re behind on your rereading of Malcolm X:
And then it was time for coffee… 2SLGBTQQIA+ welcome, but no Canine-Americans:
Wonder if NYC still has a surplus of women, now that it has dethroned silicon valley in concentration of developers/tech workers. Of course, being a tech worker today is the same as being alive.