According to secret inside sources, there is graffiti somewhere in one of this town's bathrooms that says, in effect, that Emily Hall hates art. Which is of course not true.

Except when it is, and it tends to be true for a few weeks whenever I see the Whitney Biennial. The 2002 Biennial, full of so much mediocre and unrelated art, nearly caused me to run screaming into the street. The 2004 Biennial, which I saw when I was in New York two weeks ago, just made me very tired. After two hours--much of it spent shouldering my way through dense, bovine crowds--it didn't seem to me that I had seen anywhere near what this show had to offer, or else it wasn't offering much. This is the essential paradox of big, contemporary survey shows, what gave rise to Roberta Smith's complaint a year ago in the New York Times about "festivalism," which she witheringly described as "a Lazy Susan of moralizing primness, eccentric materials, intellectual dryness, multidisciplinary amorphousness or high-tech spectacle slowly revolving on a pedestal of arrested artistic development."

For myself, I still haven't decided if the problem is the show, or if the problem is the work. Is it possible I'd be miserable and overstimulated to the point of madness in an exhibition made up of only perfect, philosophically complete works? I suspect not, since there was a run of good work on the top floor of this year's Biennial--a room full of Raymond Pettibon drawings, a handful of enormous Fred Tomaselli photo-collages (with real pills attached), some Cameron Martin paintings (almost but not quite drained of the human touch), and even the much-hyped Assume Astro Vivid Focus psychedelic room (which I bet Smith hated), which was so over the top that I found it quite lovable--that left me momentarily invigorated rather than depressed. I imagine I would have loved the installation by Yayoi Kusama, had I been able to see it; the line to get into the single-person room snaked through several galleries.

These small pockets of oases (Dave Mueller's rock-n-roll timeline, Andrea Zittel's utopic/apocalyptic-living project, Julie Mehretu's exploding cities, Catherine Opie's surfer photographs in which the surfers are lost in the enormous sweep of the ocean, like figures in Sung-era Chinese landscape paintings) were surrounded by work that was unconvincing, made up of gestures rather than acts, described in terms of "references" (oh so many of them to '70s culture) rather than ideas. After room after room of these gestures, you begin to wonder what art is for, and whether it is "for" anything but indulgent self-display. It is disheartening. You could come to hate it.

Luckily, this year's curators let Julianne Swarz create an installation in the stairwell, where you could be reminded what art is for. There she had installed a system of plastic pipes--only a few at the ground floor, but increasingly complex and church-organ-like as you ascended--carrying breathy air noises and the deep, meditative sounds of different voices singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow," as though she had plumbed the psyche of the building and found that it, too, was dreaming of a better place.