Art Attack

Whitney 2002 BiennialGerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting” is one of the last shows that will hang in the current MoMA space before it closes this week for a complete rebuild. If you can catch it between now and tomorrow when it ends, it’ll be worth nearly every moment of your time (make sure to rent the audio tour too). I found the first floor of the show to be a mixed bag, but I left the second floor with a new appreciation of Richter as one of the giants of painting.I had a much less uniform reaction to the Whitney 2002 Biennial, which goes to great pains to present a multiplicity of art world snapshots, with many painful results. I’d say fully one half of the show was dismissable, but there were a few gems in there, notably Jim Campbell’s “Fifth Avenue Cutaway #1.”

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