Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

The 2024 Whitney Biennial took the instability of the real as its subject — bodies, identities and images at a moment when artificial intelligence and legislated definitions of personhood were making "authenticity" a live political question.

Curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, the catalogue opens with a thematically organized image section drawn from the exhibition rather than an artist-by-artist march, then follows with individual entries on each participating artist. The curators contribute essays on the exhibition's premises, joined by texts from Eva Hayward and Amber Jamilla Musser that take up specific currents in the show. 256 pages with 175 color illustrations, paperback, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

The Biennial has surveyed developments in American art since 1932 and remains the museum's principal statement about the present; this eighty-first edition extended across the Whitney's Meatpacking District galleries with an accompanying program of film, performance and sound.