Brooklyn Museum showcases edgy black women's art

New York

ONE reason for the hullabaloo around Dana Schutz's painting of the murdered Emmett Till in the current Whitney Biennial is the weakness of the work. It looks half-baked, unresolved.

Like a lot of recent "political" art, it doesn't try for a weight suitable to, and therefore respectful of, its racially charged, morally shattering subject. The result, to use one writer's words, is "a tasty abstraction designed purposefully or inadvertently" to evoke an image of "common oppression".

Actually, those dismissive words weren't written about the Schutz painting. They were written in 1970 by the African-American critic Linda La Rue about the vaunted cross-cultural embrace of the second-wave feminist movement. The writer eyed with deep distrust the movement's assumption that it could speak with authority for all women, including bla…