With all good faith, yes even a leap of faith, we went to the Whitney yesterday for the annual Biennial. Not many offerings were life-enhancing, Berenson's handy term for what makes art worth seeing. We liked the Roni Horn walk in photographic installation and Catherine Opie's chromographic prints of California. Sadly though 90% of the show was amateurish and irritatingly so.

The gullible girls with their babies in strollers and high school pupils in black ... the distracting Nightmare Crowd Aspect of New York and the Trendy Media Hype (70s cliches still usable) of Gotham.

Calvin Tompkins has a good piece on the peculiar Christos in the N.Yorker, readable because it is expository and does not wade in unknown quasi-aesthetic waters that way the "criticism" of Kimmelman or Peter Schejldahl (spelling?) does.