Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, USA
Laura Owens
![Untitled, 2015 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)](https://tit-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/articles/3747/wmaa_owens_install-77small__large.jpg)
The Whitney Museum of American Art has historically positioned itself in the public imagination as an incontrovertible arbiter of taste, the sort of claim that makes its stale, self-consciously presentist choices all the more discouraging. As such, the Laura Owens retrospective currently on view feels less like the mid-career survey of a serious painter and more like an overblown Instagram backdrop, a pandering move that undercuts Owens’ contributions and reasserts the Whitney’s distance from artistic innovation. Review by Torey Akers