Given that the Whitney Biennial 2006 has the title “Day for Night,” it should not surprise us that analyses of the show get caught in reflective mirrorings that would in all other contexts be called convoluted thinking. Arthur Danto’s review in the Nation enacts strange, speculative reversals too, but, and here I enact a reversal of my own, Danto is also clear on several fronts, not least in his scepticism of the pieties of so-called political art:

There is something strangely inert about the language of mirroring and reflecting in which “Day for Night” is framed. Somehow, one feels, the experience of a work of art ought to do something more robust than reflect on good causes. It is too much to ask that we feel the way Rilke did when he stood before an archaic torso of Apollo–that he must change his life. But there seems to be little place for passion, or pleasure, in the intellectually earnest work on display here.

I say “so-called” because nothing is as complacent and close-minded as artistic pretension of the radical kind. Gestures presume to take the place of achievement; statements that are declarative at best are routinely granted the status of disturbing questions and even acts; and mere good-will or intentions get inflated and occupy all the space previously empty and demanding, however indirectly or mutely, something more difficult than conference chatter.

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