The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Choose the Artists, Ignore the Critics" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

Anthony Elms, one of the curators of this year’s Whitney Biennial. Abe Frajndlich for The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — Anthony Elms says that the first artwork he fell in love with, as a boy growing up in southern Michigan, was John Singleton Copley’s painting of a swimmer pulled from the clutches of sharks, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Mr. Elms may soon be casting his mind back to that picture as he starts to feel like chum.

He is in the last stages of being a co-curator for the latest biennial survey of this country’s art, which opens on March 7 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Now 82 years old, the show — which ran annually from 1932 until 1973 — is as famous for the vitriol it provokes as for its works: “When it comes to being boring, the Whitney staff is inexhaustibly inventive,” read one slam from 1977. “It’s glum, preachy, sophomoric and aesthetically aimless,” another critic wrote in 1993.

Encountered on his home turf at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art here, where he has been an associate curator since 2011, Mr. Elms doesn’t come across as girded for battle. He’s wearing pink jeans, a dress shirt and a tweed jacket — a sedate style he says he’s favored since high school. “I used to be the kid where they’d go, ‘Who’s the narc?’ ” Slight, almost pretty, Mr. Elms looks at least a decade younger than his 43 years.

An image from “Malachi Ritscher, Iraq War Protest, Chicago,” part of Public Collectors' project for the Biennial. Joeff Davis

He’s the wild card in the curatorial mix, somewhat junior beside Stuart Comer, the chief curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art, and Michelle Grabner, a longtime professor of painting now teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Yale. (The Whitney is giving one floor to each curator.) Before his current job, Mr. Elms helped run a minor university gallery in Chicago, after a decade spent as an exhibition preparator and a freelance writer and curator, and also making art. The invitation to do the Biennial came pretty much out of the blue, he said, after he was asked to submit a one-page proposal.

Mr. Elms said he’s read the stack of previous Biennial pans, “and I actually found that kind of liberating,” he said. “I know someone’s not going to like the show, so I might as well just go forward and try to do it the way that seems right. Maybe this is about the part of me that comes from scrappy Michigan.” He added, “Anything I can do to put more artists in more people’s faces is something I’ll say yes to.”

“A machine to catch ghosts,” by Elijah Burgher, who is in the show. Elijah Burgher

Mr. Elms’s Biennial spread will include works by 24 artists and collectives — the unknowns and the unheralded, as well as a few famous figures. Elijah Burgher is a 35-year-old painter who remembers getting the email from Mr. Elms saying he would be in the Biennial. “It sounds really silly, but I felt like I was going to faint,” Mr. Burgher said, speaking by Skype from his Chicago studio. Wearing an old red hoodie, he was bleary-eyed from finishing his Whitney work at 4 a.m.to meet the shipping deadline. Behind him on a wall hung a canvas like those he was sending to New York. The painting invokes the occult and carries a self-designed “magic” symbol, a bit like a Wiccan pentacle, that Mr. Burgher called a sigil. It seems to cross the stick figures of Keith Haring with rigorous geometric abstraction. The last-minute Biennial piece is a detailed drawing, in colored pencil, of three nude males posed in front of a crude mural of naked swordsmen.

Making esoteric work in Chicago about spells and sex can leave a young artist feeling invisible, Mr. Burgher said. A Whitney invitation promises critical validation and a market boost: “I want both — who doesn’t?”

An image from “Fountain,” by Angie Keefer. Angie Keefer

Marc Fischer is another of the eight Chicagoans whom Mr. Elms will feature on his Whitney floor. Mr. Fischer rarely makes salable objects — he lives mostly off part-time teaching and fees from museum projects — and the Biennial doesn’t offer financial rewards. “It’s a bit bizarre how special it’s treated — maybe a few more people will ask me to give a lecture,” he said in a phone interview. Although he normally works as part of a collective — this year’s Biennial will have a full eight of those — his Whitney work comes under the aegis of Public Collectors, a kind of community project that he runs solo to bring attention to the weird stuff people amass.

For the Biennial, Mr. Fischer has delved into the estate of Malachi Ritscher, who was well known in Chicago as a peace activist and for the thousands of recordings he made of the city’s music scene. He came to national attention in 2006, when he immolated himself in protest against the American war in Iraq. Mr. Fischer’s installation will include recordings by Ritscher and listening stations for them, but also a skateboard that Ritscher designed and documentation of his life, ideals and death. “I want to see the museum lend its authority to something which is not normally accorded it,” Mr. Fischer said.

Paul P., whose work “Writing Table for Nancy Mitford(Blitz Era)” will be in the show. Abe Frajndlich for The New York Times

If Mr. Elms’s tastes run from magic paintings to cassette tapes and skateboards, documentary photos and day-in-the-life videos, his eclecticism may be a reflection of a shifting moment in art, said the 36-year-old artist Paul P., whom Mr. Elms recently met. “I think that at this moment to be a curator could be a more modest act,” said the artist from his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That is, instead of making choices based on some idea of setting the art agenda, a curator could aim instead to sample the vast range of interests that artists now have.

Paul P. found success with luscious, Whistlerian paintings of young men culled from the pages of gay pornography. He said he was grateful to Mr. Elms for letting him go in a new direction: He’ll be showing his fountain-pen drawings of old master sculptures, as well as a wooden desk and stool that he designed in the refined Victorian style known as Anglo-Japanese; it was built by a Toronto craftsman.

“To have what was on the forefront of my interest be what Anthony was interested in is great,” Paul P. said.

Mr. Elms has called for a Biennial with “a multiplicity of voices and a sense of poetry,” but the role of poet these days risks being less about complex ideas rendered with maximum concision than about portentous, high-seeming confusion.

Worse yet, his party-mix approach could make his floor at the Whitney read as an avatar of the art fair, geared to collectors’ lust for variety.

The market implications of the Biennial — a recent article in Forbes discussed it as a guide to art investing — left one rigorous conceptualist, Angie Keefer, hesitant about accepting Mr. Elms’s invitation to exhibit, although she counts herself a fan of his work as a curator. After much back and forth, the piece she agreed to make will be installed near where visitors pay to enter, and will address “economic versus artistic definitions of what value is,” she said from her home in Hudson, N.Y. A projection of a lovely waterfall will be manipulated to give visitors a visceral sense — literally — of the rise and fall of commodities futures. Whether the public likes what it gets is not very much on her mind, she said — or Mr. Elms’s.