Red, White and Bleak

In the installations of Gedi Sibony and Yuri Masnyj, for instance, this new nihilism takes the majestic abstraction of a Barnett Newman or a Mark Rothko, with all its high ideals, and replaces it with agglomerations of almost haphazard objects -- carpet pads, scraps of wood and raw drywall. They look fine, in their own weird, abject way, but only wanly, accidentally, as a pile of driftwood might.

"The visual culture my generation has inherited," Masnyj says, "is a kind of flotsam and jetsam -- the product of an exponential deconstruction that took a mortar and pestle to the avant-garde but left art and design in splintered fragments." Ouch.

Urs Fischer's contribution is an impressive pair of ragged holes, maybe 15 by 30 feet, cut through a big gallery's drywall, with the excised ovals left leaning among the art nearby -- an image of the hollowness of grand artistic ambitions if ever there was one. It suggests a new model for artmaking's "holistic" aims.

You wouldn't want to condemn such a dour view of the world, or of art. When it comes to the world, it's easy to imagine a much improved version, but it's depressingly hard to know how or if we'll ever get there. In the case of art, things may look even worse: You can believe in the exhaustion of most of what is going on right now and still not have a single clue as to what a better future might be like.

But that something strong and fresh will come along seems almost certain. For 500 years, through troughs at least as deep as ours, art has always come through. And there are hints, at least, in some works in this biennial and others beyond it, that it's still got the strength to renew itself.

For now, we may want to make like Hannah Greely's lifelike rubber toddler, who hides her head under a coat in the middle of the Whitney show. Next time we look out -- if not in two years, then in 12 -- things should be different, maybe even better, than they are today.

The 2006 Whitney Biennial is the first to bear a title: "Day for Night," after the Hollywood trick for shooting night scenes in daytime, as well as for the famous Francois Truffaut movie of the same name -- whose original French title was "La Nuit Americaine" ("American Night").

The show is at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, through May 28. Call 1-800-WHITNEY or visit http://www.whitney.org/ .