THE NEW YORKER — WHAT’S NEW: The Whitney Biennial by Peter Schjeldahl

The new Whitney Biennial is startlingly good. It is better–more serious, more pleasureable–than anyone, perhaps even the curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, could have expected, given the general exhaustion and incoherence of the past decade and a half in art. Essay in the show’s catalogue impose the usual theories and exhortations, but the artists largely elude them. All of a sudden, artists are again plainly smarter in their bones than art intellectuals in their brains. The operative work is “plainly.”

Video installation is now a fully mature and independent art form that synthesizes aspects of narrative and documentary film, painting, sculpture, and decoration in real space and time. Craigie Horsfield enchants with a four-walled projection of a misty forest in the Canary Islands. Watching it, you have an experience that would be more transporting only if it included getting chilled and wet. (Also spiritually touristic is Roni Horn’s distribution, throughout the museum of sumptuous photographs of a beautiful boy, hieratic birds, and gloomy icebergs, all from Iceland.) Slater Bradley’s closeups of a youth choir in the cathedral of Notre-Dame stunningly capture states of gawkiness and anxiety in kids who singing channels divinity.