Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, USA
Laura Owens
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