Sixties Surreal at the Whitney is a bad trip
From our US edition
The Whitney’s Sixties Surreal is not about Surrealism. I spent about a week trying to figure out what it might actually be about, before I gave up. The show claims to seek to answer a simple question: what if Surrealism, rather than Cubism, had been the dominant thread in modern American art? This is funny to me, as Dalí’s melting clocks are far better known in America than any Cubist painting. Regardless, the museum never provides an answer. Instead, the Whitney jumps right to its agenda: reviving what it deems an overlooked thread of countercultural art. Ah, yes, the woefully neglected subject of… counterculture in the 1960s.
