The 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than the Real Thing, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art on March 20, 2024, and ran through August 11. The Whitney described it as the eighty-first edition of the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States, featuring seventy-one artists and collectives. Organized by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes, and with film and performance programs involving guest curators, the exhibition framed contemporary art around bodies, identity, ecological precarity, technology, and contested ideas of the real. Its subtitle explicitly responded to artificial intelligence and political uses of authenticity, making the Biennial a snapshot of U.S. contemporary art at a charged cultural moment.
It marked a major institutional survey of art after the mainstream arrival of generative AI and renewed debates over embodiment.