SKIN DEEP

The hit-or-miss body art of the Whitney Biennial.

- JACKSON ARN

If every label in "Even Better Than the Real Thing," the eighty-first installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen?

Some sections would get more confusing, of course. When you walked through the yellow-lit gallery on the museum's sixth floor, you probably wouldn't suppose that the faint buzz came from a live electrical net floating overhead, let alone that the light, the buzz, and the net might represent "the tension between dissociation and hypervigilance," according to the piece's artist, P. Staff. Passing the cluster of translucent medicine cabinets, you wouldn't know that the buttery stuff inside was Vaseline, and, even if you guessed right, you would still be ignorant of the fact that the artist, Carolyn Lazard, went with Vaseline because it is "both a lubricant and an occlusive ointment," and thus connected to her interest in "the entanglement between illness and capitalism."

But, in other ways, a label-less Biennial might be clearer. The introductory text, by the co-curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, stresses the point that "Artificial Intelligence is complicating our understanding of what is real." One of the first art works you see on the sixth floor is, sure enough, an A.I.-generated print, courtesy of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, so it's a letdown to continue through the galleries and find approximately zero other pieces dealing with artificial intelligence. A show purged of wall text wouldn't tease you like that, at least. You would also have an easier time recognizing how many of these works depend on text not just for background but for aesthetics: whatever beauty or humor they've got comes from nearby words, as the glow of the moon comes from the glare of the sun.