An aural atmosphere, not a visual image, is the signature of the 2026 Whitney Biennial. This is a show of clickings, and whooshes, and droning sounds—susurrating soundtracks that sprout from many sculptures and blend into a pleasant, moody background burble.

Is the show good? It’s not bad! I rank it a little better than the last one, a little worse than the one before that. It has a lot of the same tics, but they are evolving.

The line I’ve heard, that this is a “post-identity politics” show, reflects less a real deep change of themes and more a loss of a surrounding tone of confidence. Dig down and I’m not sure it’s much more post-identity than 2024’s show, which was itself defined by Biden-era holding-pattern energy. Outside the art world, there’s been a much-noted turn from facts to vibes, a reaction to the literalness that defined millennial social-justice culture and informational overload. Tracking this, the 2026 Whitney Biennial continues recent museum art’s journey from message to mood.

Installation view of Emilie Louise Gosslaux, Kong Play (2025). Photo by Ben Davis.

Emilie Louise Gosslaux’s tribute to her deceased seeing-eye dog opens the show on the fifth floor, a suite of winsome drawings of the artist with her pooch, plus a landscape of ceramic dog toys meant to evoke “doggy heaven” for her lost helper. These little kong sculptures are too minimalist and museum-y to truly make you feel the love, IMO—though, what do I know, I’m not a dog guy. As an opening gambit for the biennial, it signals a “sincerity first” credo, as William Van Meter wrote yesterday; art that promises a vicarious sense of emotional connection over impressive form—the look of conceptual art, but with concepts swapped out for feelings.

In another gallery, there’s the somewhat confusing presence of a vitrine with a bunch of inscrutable binders of black-and-white printed matter by the artist Mo Costello. I went to the audio guide. There, the artist explains that she makes these readers by compiling self-help community resources, then leaving them in public spaces around Athens, Georgia. Shown like this as an object under glass, she says, they might symbolize appreciation for a potential community-building DIY alternate communication network—though Costello also concedes “it’s occasionally unclear whether the readers are actively read.”

Installation view of Mo Costello, Untitled (Readers) (2015-2026). Photo by Ben Davis

The grabbiest single image in the show is by an artist born in 1947, Pat Oleszko. Blowhard (1995) is a huge inflatable head of a jester tooting a big horn. This groovy work hails from some three decades ago, a biennial version of ’90s nostalgia. In this show, it throws into relief how much of everything else is defined by its small-scale-ness, provisionality, by being little bits of things halfway between sculptural statement and personal talisman.

Overall, the primacy of mood connects to all that soundtracking—aural texture has meaning you feel, without having to read about it. (Is it possible, I suddenly wondered, that soundtracks are gradually replacing the hated museum wall texts?) Nour Mobarak’s reliefs, for instance, incorporate a cast of her pregnant belly, and are accompanied by an audio work consisting of sounds recorded from inside her body during pregnancy, made by inserting a microphone into her vaginal canal. A fetal sense of the world is about as non-conceptual as you can get, giving us the atmosphere you absorb before you are even an independent subjectivity.

Installation view of Young Joon Kwak, Divine Dance of Soft Revolt (Anna, Travis, Me) (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.

Cast body fragments were a motif of the 2024 biennial; they may be one of the major biennial-art motifs in general. Nearby to Mobarak, you have Young Joon Kwak’s shimmering installation, a spiral of revolving, disco-mirrored body fragments suspended in the air. It too has an ambient soundtrack. Sitting there, I heard a voice intone, “our desire for shiny things stems from the instinct to seek water … the shimmering lure of rivers and streams, essential for survival, has left humanity with an innate yearning for sparkle… a desire for life itself refracted through light.” Again, conscious intention floats atop a tide of primal feeling.

The wholesome sentimental energy of Gosslaux’s dog tribute is the emotional flip side of the creepy-crawlies that writhe through the show elsewhere. Horror is one of the quintessential “body genres,” whose pleasures are tied to viscerally direct feeling. You’ve got intimations of that in Gabriela Ruiz‘s blobby hybrid digital relief and in Isabelle Frances McGuire‘s gory sculpture of a zombie-like creature, hole blown in its side, ribs hanging out, based on a demon from the video game Doom (digital nostalgia is another theme.)

Installation view of Jordan Strafer, TALK SHOW (2026) in the Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.

Jordan Strafer’s video Talk Show (2026) is especially unnerving. It includes a queasy fever-dream recreation of JFK Jr.’s 1999 death in a plane crash, as well as some kind of purgatorial black-and-white talk show, and much more. I found it hard to put together the pieces on a first watch. It has the feeling of taking a look inside America’s media-addled mind to see its fantasies, and finding it full of brain worms. Which, of course, it is.

It felt like a David Lynch spin on video art. And sure enough, I see that Lynch is an influence on the artist. I note this because Lynch is the quintessential “vibes” filmmaker, always out to tap a pre-conceptual strangeness, beyond critical explanation.

Installation view of kekahi wahi with Bradley Capello, 20-minute workout (WIP) (2023/2026). Photo by Ben Davis.

Near Strafer’s room is a video by kekahi wahi, a native Hawaiian film collective. This leaps out as one of the most clear-cut examples here of the sort of works addressing historical injustice that have been a staple of many recent global art exhibitions. It evokes the history of Captain Cook’s expeditions in the Pacific, leafing together historical illustrations of 18th-century colonialism with the carnival of tourism in present-day Kealakekua Bay, site of Cook’s death in 1779, when he was killed by Hawaiians after he tried to kidnap King Kalani‘ōpu‘u.

Yet the notable thing is much less the video’s educational message and more the giddy suggestiveness of kekahi wahi’s video, which involves a bouncy aerobics class in front of the bay’s Captain Cook monument, full of rhythmic, spandexed thrusting. It gives the video a campy thirst-trap energy that makes it harder to categorize, harder to position yourself in relation to—and thus harder to read in the merely dutiful critical way.

Installation view of works by Cooper Jacoby at the Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.

Also taking the risk of crossing into creepy territory, and yielding memorable results, are Cooper Jacoby’s clock sculptures. The backstory here has to do with how insurance companies give clients “biological age” scores (as opposed to actual age) to assign risk. Each small piece represents the life of a different person via a clock that moves at a different speed, a little faster or a little more slowly, toward a predicted death. Human teeth float on the front of each medallion, serving as the clock’s hands.

These are shown alongside HAL 9000-esque robots created by Jacoby which spill out fragmentary monologues. They are A.I. voices trained on the social media archive of dead artists (it doesn’t say which dead artists). If pre-subjective emotional energy is the theme elsewhere, these are post-subjective emotional fragments. Either way, the question is, “what is emotional authenticity now, really?”

Installation view of Michelle Lopez, Pandemonium (2025). Photo by Ben Davis.

On the sixth floor, the central piece is Michelle Lopez’s ceiling-mounted video, which puts you inside a tornado. Originally meant to be shown in a planetarium (and here making you slightly feel the Whitney’s lack of a planetarium), it first presents a mindlessly cheering audience, waving their lit-up phones. Then the ceiling is ripped off by the swirling violence of the storm. After the wild vortex subsides, you sit in the drifting aftermath, scraps of American flags floating through the air. A flyer floats by, the words “SEND HELP” glimpsed on it.

Lopez’s roaring opus reads as pretty blunt against the background of this show: She has made an allegory of U.S. society being torn apart by chaotic energy. But the point is not the complexity or wisdom of what the work has to say; the point is taking a mood and turning it into an experience. On feeling, it delivers.

I could say a lot more about things that both do and do not work for me. But instead of doing a blow by blow (maybe I will do that later), let me end by noting that the moment for art captured by this 2026 Whitney Biennial is very strange.

The fifth floor entrance to the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.

At a time when the political news is as alarming as it has been at any moment in my life, the consensus appears to be that “political art” is washed. The show’s main registers remain the historical and the intimate, a step removed from current events either way.

On the other hand, I think that many of the critics and observers alienated by the moralizing tone of museum programming over the last decade thought that a vibe shift would mean a return to something called “the aesthetic,” meaning beautiful form, ambitious scale, and cathartic emotion. The 2026 Whitney Biennial is not that either.

Its mindset is also not a compromise between the political and the aesthetic. At this time, in this show, art doesn’t want to promise that it’s an instrument to change the world. It also doesn’t want to promise an escape from the weight of the world. What it offers is more like a longing to feel whatever can be felt when you don’t believe in either.