The Real Thing Is Never Better: A Critical Journey Through the 2024 Whitney Biennial's Hall of Mirrors

Let me tell you what happened when I walked into the Whitney Biennial this time. I got lost. Not physically—though the Renzo Piano building with its labyrinthine staircases can do that to you—but existentially. And that, my friends, is exactly what curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli wanted. In their "Even Better Than the Real Thing," nothing is what it seems, and everything seems like something it's not. Welcome to the art world's latest identity crisis, served with a side of AI anxiety and a garnish of American dread.

The title alone should have warned us. Cribbed from U2's "Even Better Than the Real Thing," it winks at Baudrillard's simulacra while genuflecting to our current moment of deep fakes, filter bubbles, and whatever fresh hell Meta is cooking up this week. But here's the thing: When everything is potentially fake, when reality itself becomes suspect, where does that leave art? More importantly, where does that leave us?

I'll start with the work that stopped me cold: Ser Serpas's installation of crushed shopping carts, tarps, and urban detritus arranged with the precision of a crime scene. Here's an artist who understands that America's real aesthetic isn't found in museums but in the aftermath of our consumer apocalypse. Those mangled carts aren't metaphors; they're evidence. Evidence of what we do to objects, to spaces, to each other. Standing before her work, I felt like I was looking at the bones of late capitalism, picked clean and arranged for our contemplation.

But then—and this is where the biennial gets interesting—I turned a corner and encountered Torkwase Dyson's paintings, those gorgeous abstractions that seem to breathe and expand beyond their frames. Dyson is doing something radical here: She's making abstraction political again, not through slogans or symbols, but through the very act of claiming space. Her blacks aren't just black; they're portals, possibilities, refusals to be contained. In a show wrestling with reality, Dyson reminds us that abstraction has always been a form of resistance.

The curators have organized this chaos into what they call "chapters," but don't be fooled. This isn't a book; it's a fever dream. On the fifth floor, video works flicker like synaptic misfires. Josh Kline's dystopian futures feel less like warnings and more like documentaries from next Tuesday. His work makes Black Mirror look optimistic, presenting climate collapse and algorithmic control with the matter-of-factness of a weather report. I watched visitors nervously laugh, then stop, realizing the joke might be on us.

And everywhere, everywhere, the specter of AI looms. Not as theme—the curators are too smart for that—but as condition. Avery Singer's paintings, made with 3D modeling software, ask what happens when the hand becomes just another tool, no more special than a mouse or stylus. Are they paintings? Sculptures? Does it matter? In front of her work, I heard a collector mutter, "But did she really make it?" As if we still know what "making" means in 2024.

The performance program, guest-curated by Taja Cheek (aka L'Rain), provides the biennial's beating heart. I caught Autumn Knight's performance, where she turned the museum into a space of Black feminine play, and suddenly the Whitney's white walls seemed less neutral, more complicit. Knight doesn't perform for us; she performs despite us, creating moments of joy that feel like small revolutions. In a biennial that could easily collapse under its own conceptual weight, these live moments provide oxygen, reminder that bodies still matter, presence still counts for something.

But let's talk about what's not here, what's conspicuously absent: hope. Oh, there's resistance, plenty of it. There's critique coming out of every corner. But hope? That's harder to find. Even the humor—and there is humor, particularly in Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo)'s trans flag made from emergency blankets—comes tinged with exhaustion. We're laughing, but it's the laugh of the last person at the party, surveying the damage.

This brings me to my central complaint, and it's not a small one: For all its engagement with contemporary crisis, the biennial still feels hermetic, sealed off from the city churning outside its walls. Yes, the art addresses inequality, climate change, technological alienation. But it addresses them from within the fortress of a museum where admission is $30 (free if you're under 25, but who can afford to be under 25 in New York anymore?). There's something perverse about encountering Ser Serpas's shopping carts in a building where the restaurant charges $18 for a salad.

And yet—and yet—I keep thinking about P. Staff's video work, "On Venus," which creates a speculative space where trans and gender-nonconforming people build new worlds. It's beautiful and heartbreaking and absolutely necessary. In a political moment when trans existence itself is under legislative attack, Staff's work doesn't just imagine alternatives; it insists on them. This is what the biennial does best: It gives space to artists who are already living in the future, even as the present tries to drag them back.

The surprise revelation comes from the elder statesmen (and stateswomen) in the show. Suzanne Jackson's paintings, made when she was in her 80s, vibrate with an energy that makes younger artists look tentative. Her work reminds us that experimentation isn't the privilege of youth; it's the responsibility of anyone still breathing. In a biennial obsessed with the new, Jackson's presence feels like a rebuke and a blessing.

I need to talk about Isaac Julien's "Once Again... (Statues Never Die)," because it might be the key to the whole show. Julien, working with film, creates a meditation on restitution, on what it means to return stolen objects, stolen histories. But he's too smart to make it simple. His work acknowledges that some things, once taken, can never truly be returned. The damage is done. All we can do is acknowledge it, sit with it, try to imagine repair. It's not hopeful, exactly, but it's honest.

The more I walked through the biennial, the more I realized that authenticity—that thing we're all supposedly craving in our age of deep fakes—might be the biggest fiction of all. These artists aren't trying to show us the "real" America. They're showing us an America that's always been multiple, fractured, in conversation with itself. Kevin Beasley's sound sculptures, made from cotton gin motors, don't just evoke history; they summon its ghosts, make them sing in frequencies we feel in our bones.

There's a moment in Rose Salane's film where figures move through darkness, barely visible, present and absent simultaneously. It's a perfect metaphor for the show itself: We're all here, but are we really? In an era when presence can be performed via Zoom, when connection happens through screens, when reality itself is up for grabs, what does it mean to gather in a museum, to look at objects, to share space?

I want to be clear: This is not a feel-good biennial. If you're looking for beauty, it's here, but it comes barbed. If you're looking for answers, keep looking. What Iles and Onli have assembled is something more valuable and more disturbing: a diagnosis. America in 2024 is a patient presenting multiple symptoms, and the artists here aren't offering cures—they're performing exploratory surgery.

The inclusion of Diane Severin Nguyen's videos, with their hypercolor mutations and pop-culture detritus, suggests that maybe the only way to process our current moment is through overload, through excess. Her work doesn't try to make sense; it tries to make sense of senselessness. Watching her videos, I felt my brain trying to construct narrative from chaos, and failing, and in that failure finding something like truth.

But perhaps the most radical work in the show is also the quietest. Carmen Winant's installation of photographs depicting women giving birth occupies a corridor, turning passage into pilgrimage. In a biennial concerned with authenticity, what's more real than birth? But Winant complicates even this, showing us that even the most primal experiences are mediated, photographed, shared. Privacy, her work suggests, might be the most endangered species of all.

As I made my final pass through the galleries, I kept returning to the title. "Even Better Than the Real Thing." It's a provocation, sure, but also maybe a proposition. If reality is broken—and looking around, who could argue otherwise?—then perhaps art's job isn't to reflect it but to imagine alternatives. Not better worlds, necessarily, but different ones. Worlds where identity is fluid, where bodies refuse categorization, where history speaks in frequencies we're just learning to hear.

The 2024 Whitney Biennial doesn't resolve our current contradictions; it amplifies them. In lesser hands, this would feel like failure. But Iles and Onli understand something crucial: Resolution is a luxury we can't afford right now. What we need is to stay in the difficulty, to resist the easy answers, to keep looking even when what we see disturbs us.

Walking out onto Gansevoort Street, the city hit me like a wall of sound and fury. But something had shifted. The biennial had done its job: It had made the familiar strange, the strange familiar. For all my criticisms—and they are real—I left changed. Isn't that what we ask of art? Not to comfort us, but to alter us, to make us see differently?

In the end, the 2024 Whitney Biennial succeeds not because it provides answers but because it asks better questions. In a moment when everyone claims to know what's real, what's fake, what's authentic, the artists here refuse certainty. They offer instead something more precious: doubt. Productive, generative, necessary doubt.

And maybe that's the real thing we need right now. Not answers, but better questions. Not authenticity, but honesty about our performances. Not resolution, but the courage to stay unresolved. The Whitney Biennial has always been a mirror, but this year it feels more like a black mirror—reflecting not just what we are, but what we're becoming. Look closely. The view isn't pretty, but it's undeniably us.