Now we know why the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned Hans Haacke to create a work of art for its 2000 Biennial exhibition: sheer desperation. They must have hoped that Mr. Haacke, who specializes in delivering left-wing political sermons dressed up as art, would inject a few red corpuscles into an exhibition that turns out to be notable only for its unrelieved tedium. In the recent past, the Whitney Biennial has been repellent. It has been silly. It has been full of ugly, pathological, pointless objects. But has it ever been quite so uniformly dull?

It was a good thing that the Whitney Museum leaked details of Sanitation, the work they commissioned from Mr. Haacke, before the Biennial actually opened. That at least generated some controversy. Otherwise we doubt that anyone would have paid much attention to it. Yes, it is certainly outrageous that Mr. Haacke should compare Mayor Giuliani and other public ...

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