Critic Eleanor Heartney described the biennial as «
social work or therapy» with pieces that were «numbing didactic,» and said that too many of the «most
prominent works simply target the white male power elite as the source of all evil.»
The curator's inclusion of Motherwell's citation of Harold Rosenberg's excerpt from his 1952 «The American Action Painters» essay in a work on paper is a nod to their relationship, but it also calls to mind that historically, Motherwell's work, like that of his New York School colleagues, was placed within a discourse that was either existential or formal — devoid of
social and political contexts — by
prominent critics Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg.