At the press preview on Wednesday, 2010 Whitney Biennial co-curator Francesco Bonami waxed emotional about how curating a Biennial is about trust: he trusts Gary, Gary trusts him, the Deutsche Bank trusts both of them, and we should trust them. Though their effort appeared earnest, it was unclear why anyone should trust these two to sum up the state of art in this country.  The roster was kept thin to the detriment of the show's practical function as a survey, and, in contrast to Biennials of the past decade, the "thematic" was deliberately avoided to the detriment of any curatorial cohesion.  Linda Yablonsky calls it the "shy biennial," but it would be more honest to call it the boring biennial -- not boring as an aesthetic principle as in the 2008 raw-wood biennial, but boring as in forgettable, and certainly a far cry from the inspired visions of Shamim Momin and Larry Rinder in recent Biennials past. Isolated incidents of interest included Josephine Meckseper's ominous, often red- and blue-filtered Mall of America video; the above still is from a video-game war simulation in the work's arcade passage. Meckseper also produced Amalgamated, an iphone video about the Marcel Breuer building itself, a motif also taken up by R.H. Quaytman in a series of photographs of artist K8 Hardy posed Edward-Hopper-style in front of the museum's signature trapezoidal window.  Aurel Schmidt's watercolor of a minotaur with fur encrusted with condoms, BlackBerries, and Budweiser beer cans was stunning -- a highlight both in its technique and poignant critique -- but possibly more in keeping with the interests of the 2006 "Day for Night" Biennial.  It's possible to start picking it apart -- Jim Lutes is an inappropriate selection (this year's Bechtle?); Bruce High Quality is untested (to use their faux-school rhetoric); Maureen Gallace is Fairfield Porter-lite, if such were even possible -- duller still than Eugene Boudin; photographs of atrocities from Iraq and Afghanistan are gratuitous and speak more to obvious political points than to any new direction in contemporary art; Aki Sasomoto's Ernesto-Neto-meets-Sarah-Sze installation was acceptable on its own, but flopped when it became host to a frankly cringeworthy performance, etc. Under the lazy heading "2010," disparate interests were brought under the sole guiding order of sparsity, a curatorial tool ill-suited to a survey exhibition.