I walked through the Whitney Biennial twice this weekend. Below is a list of my favorites (in order) along with 2 disappointments.

#1  Michael Asher – his “piece” is having the Whitney open 72 hours straight beginning May 26 @12:01am. I’ll be there at 4 am for sure – I’ve never visited a museum and then watched the sun rise… and then had breakfast.. and then gone into work.

#2  Kerry Tribe – A fantastic, must-see double projection film where one film is 20 seconds behind the other. Extremely smart and poetic.

#3  R.H. Quaytman – Always a favorite of mine in my gallery visits, Quaytman delivers something more for the Biennial. Highlighting the iconic window in the room, she suddenly made me consider that window as HER sculpture.

#4  Sharon Hayes – I don’t like video art in large curated shows– mostly because I like to watch films in their entirety and I don’t have the patience to sit through 6+ hours of art films. But my "top list" is 3/5ths film!!! So bravo. Hayes’ film installation is fun without being silly, strange without being weird, and challenging without being difficult.

#5  Ari Marcopoulos – The film was good (2 kids mixing “effects pedals”) but the context made the experience. The HUGE room makes the film feel more claustrophobic and gives you room to dance to music that is… undanceable.

Disappointments:

Alex Hubbard - The artist I was most looking forward to (see my blog post) let me down for the first time. It was both too much and not enough.

George Condo – Like him or hate him, his painting felt the most “dated” (i.e. out of date) in the whole show

Today I caught up on a few museum shows I've been meaning to see... 

@ The Met
The Drawings of Bronzino
The double-sided drawings with vandalism or "child drawings" were my favorite on multiple levels.
Young Archer Attributed to Michelangelo
The wall text was the most interesting (in a good way).
Surface Tension: Contemporary Photos from the Collection
Not much I haven't seen before - but I'm always a sucker for Wolfgang Tillmans

@ The Guggenheim
Tino Sehgal
Only had time for a 3 minute peek, but it's already made my #1 museum pick.

@ The Whitney
Omer Fast
Currently on my "top five" for his Chelsea show, this was better.
Collecting Biennials
The biennial info/angle didn't add much for me.  A good idea none-the-less.

This weekend I took (pictured above from left) Mike, Jane, Marie & Hunter to see 5 shows plus a bonus gallery!  Rather than go straight from "The Top Five", I chose only 3 of the 5 and added some different shows to create a more rounded experience.  We saw five shows in different mediums dealing with "alternative portraiture" - a very loose category that I just made up.  We saw:

Film: Grace Schwindt @ White Columns

Sculpture: Daniel Rozin @ bitforms

Painting: Roy Newell @ Carolina Nitsch

Photography: David Maisel @ Von Lintel

Installation: Anthony McCall @ Sean Kelly

The "bonus gallery" was a performance at Greene Naftali.... just artsy people being half naked, drunk and artsy.

I've asked them to comment on their experience below.

The webcam has been down since mid-November when I moved.  A million complications arose (okay maybe only like 6.. but it felt like a lot).  I needed new longer cables and had to cut and re-splice the cable (not an easy task on an ethernet cable) to run the wires where I needed them in the house.  The camera is Mac compatible, but needs to be configured on a PC. When I finally borrowed a PC, I couldn't find the installation CD and ended up figuring a way around it in discussion groups. And then it wouldn't work with my new router... and then I couldn't get the password protection removed... the list goes on.  Bottom line: it's up and running now.  I'll move it closer to the painting in a few days to get better detail.

http://www.thetwopercent.com/blogs/webcam