Whitney Biennial Curators Announced

Because the 2006 Whitney Biennial was without a doubt, and by far, the worst museum show that I have ever seen, I was curious about the direction of the 2008 Biennial.

Unlike that disaster, which was "curated" by two European-born curators (who had both been living and working in the United States), according to the NYT's Carol Vogel, the 2008 Biennial will go back to locals: leading the effort will be two Whitney curators: Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, and Donna De Salvo, the museum's chief curator, will oversee the curatorial effort.

Three outside advisers will help: Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem (and a former curator at the Whitney); Bill Horrigan, director of the media arts department at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University; and Linda Norden, a curator and writer who was the commissioner of the United States pavilion for the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she organized an exhibition on Ed Ruscha that traveled to the Whitney.

I am excited that there's a non New Yorker in the pack of advisors, and sincerely hope that this Whitney Biennial finally recognizes that there's artwork being produced in the few thousand miles that exist between New York and LA. However, I'm already gloomy, as the fact that Horrigan is the director of the media arts department at a major midwestern University already prejudices my opinion in that here we'll have yet another guy who still thinks that videos are "new."

And to make it even more likely that this will turn out to be yet another New York-centric artists' home movies exhibition, consider that Henriette Huldisch was responsible for coordinating the film and video program for the 2006 Biennial and Momin was one of the three curators for the 2004 Biennial.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Feh!