You may not receive a warm welcome to the 2024 Whitney Biennial, but you could hardly encounter a more impressive one. You could drive a truck through the entrance to each of its two main floors, at the Whitney through just yesterday, August 11. Maybe you should for self-protection (and forgive me for not posting this last week to remind you to go, but with fall coming soon this is still a good time to look back).
Painted clouds frame one entrance, as if the biennial itself had descended from the sky. It opens onto a wall-sized video and unknown voices over gentle music. 
The other dares you to enter a room of searing yellow. If it all feels slightly unreal, it is, as the show’s title has it, “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Yet it seems determined to “get real,” with an outsize display of raw materials and all too serious politics. Such, it announces, is the larger than life state of the art.
So much larger, in fact, that I shall take you through it piece by piece over the course of this week, starting with an extra post for tomorrow. Next time, then, I ask what the show is really about, its themes and its expectations. Then I take up the story with a walk through the exhibition to see what holds the experience together. Last, I focus on two dominant motifs, multimedia and politics. Could there be real drawbacks in big ambitions? Definitely, but also what amount to exhibitions in themselves along the way.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.