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. 

Paul Pfeiffer's 2002 still, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: 7, is an extraction from basketball footage, one of several in a series in which sports gestures are decontextualized and, in isolation, made to signify anew, largely eliciting tropes of existential angst that emerge in the absence of the frame of time. Seemingly for topical reasons, the work has surfaced in "Size Does Matter," basketball player Shaquille O'Neal's catch-all group show curated for The Flag Art Foundation, which opened on Friday to a line of gawking spectators. Among works by Tim Hawkinson, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, etc. hung a Peter Max portrait of "Shaq" and other assorted kitsch.  In such a context, the subject of basketball took priority in Four Horsemen, one of many instances in the show in which subtlety of meaning dissolved into a crass first order of signification.  While art fairs have acclimated current viewership to a a certain site-unspecificity and disregard for thematic principles that unite individual visions, this show, which might have been called "Context Does Matter," takes de-mythologization further; it made about as much sense as a MoMA curator stepping in for a round of professional basketball.  

The artistic screenshot, which debuted in the pages of Museo No. XII is a burgeoning artform. Like the collage before it, the screenshot generates meaning largely through reconfiguration rather than new generation, though in contrast to its analogue counterpart, the screenshot affords greater editorial flexibility, an increased tendency towards exploration stemming from material ease and economy, and an unprecedented rapidity in the ideation-to-exhibition trajectory. 

The current group show at Zach Feuer Gallery, Spontaneous Generation, features a painting by Kevin Zucker, which includes transfers of a curated selection of Google SketchUp 3D models categorized under the keywords, "abstract sculpture." Among these digital drawings is a recreation of a toppled proto-Minimalist Brancusi Endless Column, which occupies a space of competing grids: the illusion-oriented orthogonals of a one-point perspective system and a decidedly two-dimensional grid of registration marks, suggesting not only graph paper but the structures of several computer programs.  Through Zucker's signature transfer process, the surfaces of the rendered sculptures degrade, suggesting the impending decrepitude of the utopian aspirations of our digital age, like those of any other, including Brancusi's and Brunelleschi's.  In his interview for Museo, conducted almost a decade ago during our Columbia days and recently re-released, Zucker addresses many issues that remain pertinent in his practice today.

Jeff Koons has been selected to create the 17th BMW Art Car in the thirty-fifth year of a program that commenced with Alexander Calder in 1975 and has included such artists as Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, and most recently Olafur Eliasson, whose 2007 Arctic-sunrise-igloo-styled BMW H2R World Speed Record Hydrogen Car (top) was remarkably elegant but embellished to a point at which the unique car subject's recognizability was eclipsed. The idea of an art car, particularly one made from a luxury car base, may seem tautological (or self-reflexive, depending on spin); it also auspiciously, if subtly, implies some future state in which the vehicle of our age, like parchment, will have its use value rendered obsolete to be used, instead, solely in an economy of function-less exchange value like the art world.  The car as art object has, in recent years, become a fairly persistent concern. Pictured here is a smattering of such, proceeding from the second image Gabriel Orozco's La DS (1993), a Citorën, with the middle third removed, currently on view at MoMA; Matthew Day Jackson's car from the 2009 show "The Immeasurable Distance" at MIT's List Visual Arts Center; Erwin Wurm's fat cars; Justin Lowe's 2006 Helter Swelter at the now-closed Oliver Kamm 5BE Gallery, one of the finest shows in NADA Alley; plus Barry McGee's piled-up vans and overturned trucks; Matthew Barney's vehicular pieces from Cremaster 2 (1999); and looking further back, Martin Kippenberger's Capri by Night (1982), among others.  Perhaps Koons' yacht Guilty (2008) for Dakis Joannou (bottom) gives some indication of his ideas for the car.