There are museum exhibitions that divide critical opinion along party lines, so to speak, and there are museum exhibitions that win something close to universal acclaim. But it is rare—in my experience, anyway—for a major museum exhibition that is devoted to a large and familiar subject to meet with a chorus of scorn, condescension, and derision from critics of almost every persuasion. Yet this has been the unhappy fate of the exhibition called “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–2000” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.[1] Critics who rarely agree about anything, in either art or life, have found much to dislike about “The American Century” and little to admire. Their reasons vary, of course, but not their overall verdict. It is this adverse critical response to “The American Century” that has made this exhibition something of a milestone in the annals of late twentieth-century museology. Which, in a way, is what the organizers of the show set out to achieve with “The American Century,” though what they ended up with was clearly not the kind of milestone the Whitney had in mind for this ambitious undertaking.

What went wrong? In exploring this question, which has immense implications for the future of our art museums, it has to be understood that the fiasco we speak of has been an aesthetic and intellectual fiasco. The experience of art, which it is the function of an art museum to protect and enhance, has been traduced, and the intellectual