Whitney Biennial 2024

With this year’s Whitney Biennial already having been dismissed by many critics (The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture) as riskless, I felt hard-pressed to agree.

- Terence Trouillot

Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

It’s an accusation that – for an exhibition which, historically, has been the target of tremendous rebuke and, in recent years, mired by unwelcome, and seemingly never-ending, controversy – feels somewhat pedantic, even tiresome. Yet, criticism with a capital ‘C’ appears to rear its ugly (albeit discerning) head with greater zeal at the Whitney Biennial – the longest-running show dedicated to art in the US – than at any other large-scale exhibition on the North American art calendar. While many may disagree with this observation, to me the scale and severity of the biennial’s media coverage feels disproportionate – especially when considering how much of what is written today falls under the rubric of ‘art writing’ (arguably a euphemism for ‘moderate’ art criticism).

Ultimately, much as I did in 2019 – another biennial deemed soft by critics (The Art Newspaper, Artsy, The Guardian) – I feel inclined to defend this year’s exhibition, ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’, amid the opprobrium it’s provoked. Co-curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli have transformed the Renzo Piano-designed, glitzy corporate fortress that has been home to the Whitney since 2017 into an environment that prioritizes carefully crafted exhibition design. The result is not always successful, but it’s a far cry from the previous biennial’s chock-a-block arrangement of works. This year’s expertly curated edition avoids these all-too-common pitfalls to showcase a tremendous array of impressive and, yes, beautiful art.