This year the curators are Chrissie Iles, the Whitney's curator of video and film, and Philippe Vergne, from the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis. They made this Biennial the first to have a title, "Day for Night," after François Truffaut's 1973 film, which took its title in turn from the Hollywood-invented technique of filming night scenes conveniently and with less mechanical difficulty during the day by using a special lens filter. According to the Biennial's official Web site, the title captures this Biennial's theme of contemporary art residing in a "twilight zone." Just as twilight is a time when we're not sure whether it's day or night, contemporary art is, according to the Whitney, an art about which we're not sure what to say when it comes to meaning. In his obligatory pronouncement on this year's Biennial, the Whitney's director, Adam D. Weinberg, writes, "Today's artistic situation is highly complex, contradictory, and confusing." Hard to argue with that; even the experts are more or less at a loss about where we are with contemporary art.

I think the experts aren't at a loss. They've deliberately used a special lens filter.