Verne Dawson at the Whitney Bienniel

I was so happy to see that Verne Dawson has been chosen for the next Whitney Biennial. The hopelessly dopey, deliciously hokey Dawson treated as if he were a serious painter! Amazing! I mean, he's not even a serious illustrator. Human anatomies like doodles. Trees like tangles of wire—partially disentangled, I grant you, but how much allowance must we make for amateurism? The space in Dawson's paintings feels flat, like a sheet of tinted cardboard, or gelatinous, like the inside of a jelly doughnut. Yummy, but no yummier than the idea that Dawson is a latter-day shaman, a mystic and seer whose meditations on the past have something to tell us about the future. What, exactly, is his message? That we are getting sillier and sillier and so, by the time the apocalypse arrives, we will be too infantile to be all that upset.