On the eve of America’s 250th engagement, I made my belated way to the Chelsea–Meatpacking district, home of the 82nd Whitney Biennial and its thirty-dollar ticket. I’ll leave the price there, except to say that thirty dollars sharpens the question of what, exactly, one is being asked to enter: the house of “Great American Art,” an institutional stage whose American posturing is impossible to separate from its power — especially now, as the Whitney approaches its centennial consecration. Congratulations on surviving long enough to become your own alibi.

The viewer is asked to consider the shifting currents of art and the United States: not only what is being made, but what it means to name something American at all. That second question is the Biennial’s real labor and responsibility. Curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, the show declines to name a theme, preferring to let their studio visits of more than 300 artists “guide” it. The result reads less as open-endedness than as abdication. Without a thesis to stand on, the exhibition leaves its architecture to do the arguing — and it is there, in the sequence and spatial hierarchy most clearly orchestrated by the curators, that this year’s edition largely fails.

With the recent protests in New Jersey in mind — the heavy police presence, the streets toxified by tear gas — I entered through the institution’s sanctified gates with the not-so-distant memory of Warren Kanders’ resignation, only to be greeted first by an interspecies relationship between a dog and their owner.

I trust Louise Gossiaux’s drawings of London and ceramic Kong Play have already received their fair share of tenderness elsewhere. This is not a complaint about the dog paintings, which are perfectly fine, nor a denial of the delicate and deeply entangled sensory-informed relationship between an owner and their dog. Let’s just consider the framing. This is an observation about priority. To open here — in a year of open-air detention, renewed US–Israel escalation with Iran, a second Trump administration, and the consolidation of a techno-feudal class — is to make a choice about what registers and what does not in the room where the canon is set.

Eight floors above, is Precious Okoyomon’s Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid (2026): fifty-five small creatures, sewn from taxidermied wings and salvaged toys, suspended from the rafters by nooses. Nearby, six figures fit the heads of mid-century blackface dolls into plush bunny suits. The reference to lynching is plain, and the work earns its plainness — childhood softness made the host for historical violence. It is among the strongest things in the building with any real somatic charge.

Within the same cluster of works, Akira Ikezoe shifts the register into ecological delirium: frog- and mole-creatures routed through a diagrammatic industrial system, life and death cycled through a power plant’s logic, equal parts medieval cosmogram and assembly line. The Sisyphean conveyor belt of production and addictive consumerism, depicted through Ikezoe’s fantastical lens, is granted momentary institutional visibility — and with it, our sanctioned attention. It’s funny to watch frogs, bodies, machines, dolls, and industrial hallucinations wedged between floors of Warholian collection rooms and other canonical holdings, where their manic systems feel more alive than the narratives around them. Ikezoe makes the surrounding canon look tired — and the show doesn’t seem to know what to do with that contrast.