The 81st Whitney Biennial, “Even Better Than The Real Thing,” feels decidedly anti-artificial intelligence. The introductory wall text puts it bluntly: the people behind the biennial “acknowledge that Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is complicating our understanding of what is real,” and that these developments coupled with alarming rhetoric around gender and authenticity “are part of a long history of deeming people of marginalized race, gender and ability as subhuman—less than real.”

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What is real is organizers Chrissie Iles, Meg Onli, Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes’ commitment to sharing the work of the human artists who are confronting difficult legacies in increasingly constructed worlds into “a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered.”

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Unsurprisingly, it’s complicated, but the Whitney Biennial traditionally has been. The seventy-one artists participating are free to express their agendas on the museum’s walls and observers are free to respond. Thus far, “Even Better Than The Real Thing” is one of the museum’s better biennials, with fewer protests and controversy than in some recent years. The 2017 biennial featured........

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