Newsweek‘s Peter Plagens sees the retrenchment of this year’s Whitney Biennial away from identity politics, or any other sort of politics, as a very good thing:

Sometimes the art world actually lags behind society, and the bursting of its preachy-self-indulgence bubble follows rather than leads the collapse of the economy’s credit bubble by a couple of years. In the money world, anybody could borrow any amount for practically anything. In art, anyone could claim to be addressing any social issue with just about any work, and curators believed it. But just as credit on demand didn’t make the economy more sound, credibility on demand for message art didn’t make exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial any better. The welcome upshot of this Biennial’s retrenchment could be that in galleries and museums, the audience gets treated to more art and less instruction. Except, perhaps, at the panel discussion.

But What Does It Mean? (Newsweek)