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The answer to such questions turned out to hover somewhere between "Maybe" and "Uh, no." The lesson of the past three decades, since Minimalism hove on the horizon (soon to be followed by Conceptual Art, which even got rid of the cinder blocks and left only a residue of words), is that in art people love rarity, singularity, fully realized handcraft, fine materials and interesting content--the last not to be confused with mere storytelling. To most of them a pile of bricks a la Carl Andre is just that, a pile of bricks, and nothing, especially nothing written in the strained jargon of "modularity," "sequentiality" and "factuality" favored by critics in art magazines, is going to lift it into the same category of experience as a marble carving or a bronze.
Still less is the austerity of a Minimalist work going to be seen as an affirmation of virtue, like a hair shirt on a saint. Rightly or wrongly, it is more likely to be seen as the Emperor's new clothes--a lack, a way of frustrating expectations with arid polemics about the arguable limits and nature of art itself. Between (say) the bricks, the cinder blocks and the parallel stripes on one hand and (say) the gilded statue of General Sherman on horseback at the corner of Central Park by Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the other, a vast gulf of experience is fixed. Even if viewers twig that the artist has generous and even noble intentions, it is idle to suppose that anything will persuade them that the stripes come within a mile of the Sherman, let alone have some evolutionary edge over it merely because they appear 70 years farther down the history of art. For though art changes, it does not evolve.
Which brings us to Sol LeWitt, there in the Whitney. There is no doubt of the probity and generosity of this artist, born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents and trained at Syracuse University and at New York's School of Visual Arts, with an additional background of architectural drafting in the offices of I.M. Pei. Every one of the seven essays in the show's thick catalog pays effusive tribute to the sum of LeWitt's virtues, his "openness" and his "honesty," his recoil from the cult of "heroic" personality and his generous encouragement of a score of his contemporaries, from the sculptor Eva Hesse to the critic Lucy Lippard. Selfless, sober, rational, public spirited--what, one is frivolously tempted to wonder, is such a paragon doing in the Whitney, an institution more noted in the '90s for staging tributes to delinquent cult figures like the late Robert Mapplethorpe and the equally late and even more overpraised Jean-Michel Basquiat? Not even the most obsessed Christian Fundamentalist could find much to burn in LeWitt, except a few tufts of pubic hair in some of the early serial closeups of nudes, done in homage to the sequential-motion studies of the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and about as erotic.