Aurel Schmidt's "Master of the Universe/Flexmaster 3000" (above) is my favorite, distorting mythology and form, among just a tiny handful from this year's Whitney Biennial, which was otherwise crap. A lifeless display of what happens when MFA-wielding artists are safely selected among those in the insider's institutional name game club. Themes were so out of touch with the times we're living in, and so conceptual, that the works required more background reading than anything else... we could've easily have just read an essay about what the work wanted to achieve, without experiencing the work itself. In fact that would've been preferable instead of the distraction of going through the vast spaces of the museum, and seeing the work merely as wasted real estate, imagining the money that it took to support the work's space in the museum. And although sometimes conceptual and abstract art can be interesting because of meticulous production value...here...what production value? Art that exists only within its own community has developed a language for insiders only, stripped of the experiential aspect of art. Not that it has to appeal to the masses on the other end of the spectrum, but there needs to be a serious re-evaluation of where the art world is going. Because right now? Boring. Pointless.
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