While Aspen is normally thought of as a ski-season destination, the exhibition will cross over, June 18 through June 20, with the huge Aspen Food & Wine Classic, an event that every spring draws about two dozen of New York’s top chefs (and many of its top eaters).

The nine artists on display include Mark Wallinger, who has won Britain’s Turner Prize, and L.A. painter Frances Stark, who was in the last Whitney Biennial.

The works aren’t just sculptures plunked down in midtown; they’re intended to integrate with Aspen. So memorial benches by Lars Ramberg salute local Woody Creek legend Hunter S. Thompson. Quotes from the writer will add up to a larger text that “upends the sentimentality associated with memorializing,” according to the artist.

The exhibition aims to create “a space for the unexpected experience,” said museum director and chief curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. Viewers “can choose to sit on a bench, walk among the objects installed around the city, think about philosophy and life, read the paper and whistle about injustice, or merely observe others doing so.” She’s referring to artists Allora & Calzadilla’s HOPE HIPPO, 2005 sculpture, which was a huge hit at the Venice Biennale. Someone sits on the hippo at all times reading a newspaper—and whistling.

Sitting in his office at the Whitney late last month, the 29-year-old Mr. Carrion-Murayari said it took him no time at all to accept the position when the museum’s chief curator, Donna DeSalvo, offered it to him. Working on the Whitney’s 75th Biennial—arguably the most high-profile platform available to a curator of contemporary art in this country—turns him, overnight, from a well-regarded but obscure curatorial assistant into a household name among gallerists, artists and other museum people in New York and around the country.

Now, about 16 months later, Mr. Carrion-Murayari finds himself on the home stretch, making sure projects are coming in on time and helping with the installation of the 55 works he and Mr. Bonami have selected for inclusion in the show. Titled simply 2010, the Biennial will open on Feb. 25, at which point Mr. Carrion-Murayari’s curatorial talents and taste will be subjected to the chorus of critics and assorted art world aficionados who in years past have so reliably and athletically savaged the Biennial for failing to meet their expectations.

Mr. Carrion-Murayari appears to have braced himself for a potentially hostile reception.

“People will always find something to not like,” he said. “Some people might hate that we have a floor that’s mostly film and video, and some people might love that. Some people might hate that we have so much painting. There’s a fair number of critics who are just interested in picking on things, or looking for an angle from which to criticize the show. It’s just completely unavoidable.”

Putting young people in charge of the Biennial is nothing new for the Whitney. The 2008 show, for example, was curated by Shamim Momin (now the director of LAND in Los Angeles) and Henriette Huldisch, who were 34 and 36 at the time. According to New Museum director Lisa Phillips, who, at 30, was among the team that curated the 1987 show, this is because the whole point of the Biennial is to provide as current a survey of the contemporary art world as possible.

“In some ways, it’s really made for a young curator,” Ms. Phillips said. “This kind of exhibition, that’s looking at the present moment, benefits from having that fresh perspective, and from having the point of view of someone who is just getting established and is really in touch with the work of their peers.”

Which is to say that Mr. Carrion-Murayari’s age does not, in itself, make his appointment unusual. What does is the fact that he has been matched, one-on-one, with a curator as seasoned as Mr. Bonami, who at, 54, has enjoyed a long and distinguished career that includes serving as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, directing the 2003 Venice Biennale and editing the U.S. edition of the magazine Flash Art. The intergenerational partnership between him and Mr. Carrion-Murayari is unprecedented in recent Biennial history, and when it was announced in December of 2008, many in the art world assumed that they were looking at a mentor-apprentice situation rather than a collaboration between two equals.

But Mr. Carrion-Murayari and Mr. Bonami insist that their work on the Biennial has been marked by total equality. In Interview last month, Mr. Bonami said that while he initially made a point of asserting himself as the “head curator,” it quickly became clear that he and Mr. Carrion-Murayari would be making every decision together, without regard for hierarchy.

Mr. Carrion-Murayari attributes this improbable dynamic to their preexisting relationship, which began several years ago when they worked together on a Rudolf Stingel retrospective that traveled in 2007 to the Whitney from the MCA. Mr. Bonami came away from that experience impressed, and afterward took an interest in Mr. Carrion-Murayari’s work, helping him place pieces in art magazines and getting together with him regularly for drinks.

When the Whitney people asked Mr. Bonami if he wanted to work with someone in-house, he said, Mr. Carrion-Murayari was a “natural choice.” The fact of his age, in Mr. Bonami’s view, was only an advantage, the idea being that Mr. Carrion-Murayari would be there to call the old geezer out when it seemed like he was following impulses rooted in nostalgia and habit.

“He’s half my age, so he has a fresh mind,” said Mr. Bonami by phone from Italy. “I have a completely dusty one. When you’re a curator, the risk is that you start to believe your own act and you start to think that everything you think is the right thing.”

The difference in age and experience separating the two curators has been something of a running joke: At a meeting with the Whitney board where the two of them introduced themselves to the museum’s trustees, Mr. Bonami is said to have listed his accomplishments, before turning to Mr. Carrion-Murayari and saying that he had no history to speak of.

What little history he does have is set entirely at the Whitney, where he has been working ever since he graduated from Colgate University with an art history degree and got an internship there under curator Chrissie Iles.

“I didn’t just say, ‘Do the filing,’” Ms. Iles said of her early days working with Mr. Carrion-Murayari. “We sat and talked a lot, and I would ask his opinion on things. We’d go to shows together, and he would always have a very clear, considered opinion.”

She quickly recognized in him an uncommon talent for picking out great work, and has been training him ever since.

As an intern, and later as a curatorial assistant, Mr. Carrion-Murayari worked on numerous shows with Ms. Iles, including the 2004 and 2006 Biennials. By the time he was called up to serve at Mr. Bonami’s side on the 2010 Biennial, he had already curated a show of his own—“Television Delivers People”—and was working on two others.

The first thing Mr. Carrion-Murayari did after accepting the gig was sit down and make a list of artists he was interested in. Then he started asking friends around the country to recommend artists he and Mr. Bonami should meet with and consider including in the show. Before long his in-box started filling up with emails from dealers and artists lobbying for his attention. He started staying later and later every day at the museum, and was eventually compelled by the long hours to move from his apartment in Red Hook to Astoria because the once tolerable commute had become unmanageable.

Since then, Mr. Carrion-Murayari has flown all over the country with Mr. Bonami, meeting up with art world friends and trusted satellites in cities like Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago and visiting dozens of artists at their studios. On the road, Mr. Bonami said, he found himself struggling to keep up with his sidekick in the eating and drinking department.

“I’ll probably have a heart attack after this show,” he said. “He can eat things that I’m not supposed to eat.”  One thing that hasn’t really happened is fights. In fact, neither Mr. Bonami nor Mr. Carrion-Murayari could think of a single time the two of them strongly disagreed on something. All of which sounds nice, but seems to undermine the idea that pairing a veteran with a rookie would create a productive tension and make the Biennial more fresh as a consequence.

Asked whether he thought the age difference between him and Mr. Bonami had contributed to the character of the show in any way, Mr. Carrion-Murayari said he wasn’t sure. “I think it could have, if it had been different people,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have some disagreements during the installation.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Part of the narrative will be an inventory of reviews. Given the negative and sometimes vitriolic criticism the Biennial has engendered over the years, it should be an entertaining and maybe hilarious roundup. But then, any exhibition purporting to define the current state of American art is asking for it.

You’ve got to have some sympathy for the curators—to paraphrase R&B duo Sam and Dave, the Biennial can’t stand up for falling down. Yet it’s a perennial hit, and judging by the crush of media types that showed up for the press preview, the 2008 edition will be no exception. (The general public can expect to wait in a line trailing around the corner of Madison and 75th Street.)

The first thing I did upon entering the Whitney was race toward the second-floor restroom—not out of necessity, but out of curiosity. Would there be art displayed in there? It’s happened before, and is a pretty sure gauge of the Biennial’s free-for-all ethos. Sure enough, there was something above the hand dryer: A black metal box with an angled mirror inside.

I couldn’t find an identifying label, but a security guard assured me it was a work of art. Another guard told me there was a similar black box in the ladies’ room. The gracious press folks knew nothing about them. The Biennial image list doesn’t include the black boxes, nor does the catalog. Were they a long-term installation, a work from the permanent collection or artful bathroom fixtures?

Probably the latter, but that’s the confusion the contemporary scene poses: What isn’t art? The Biennial doesn’t answer the question because it hardly realizes the question exists. The art world elite and the culture at large take for granted that anything is fair game; artists have a liberty of means that was unimaginable 50 years ago. But the only thing heedless freedom has resulted in is avant-gardist novelty.

Take Bert Rodriguez’s elevator installation The End (2001). After stepping into the elevator, the doors close and we read on them the piece’s title; music plays from the finales of well-known films. Mr. Rodriguez’s piece is charming because it’s predictable. Oh those crazy artists, they’re at it again! At which point visitors can move on to the next distraction.

This is the blandest Biennial in memory and, in its own dithering way, the happiest. The fun-house aesthetic reigns. The easy gratifications of spectacle have replaced the rigors of engagement. Most of the featured artists plug into received conceits as if they were a new pair of socks. Proud triviality is the consequence, and the point. Racial politics are no more meaningful than dressing in Viking drag.

IT'S ONE THING after another at the Biennial: rickety installations, the requisite array of dark rooms, droning voices, pseudo-zoological environments and more videos than any reasonable person should experience in a lifetime. The 80 or so artists employ lots of stuff—try not stumbling over it—but little of it has been crafted with a sense of possibility or joy. Material sensuality is suspect, and avoided. What a puritanical lot.

Anxious to touch upon the full range of existing aesthetics, the curators end up with a swift blur of anonymity. This is typical of far-reaching overviews—artists get stiffed for the sake of inclusiveness. But the Biennial isn’t about hard-won individuality; it’s about striking a pose. There’s a cool elegance to it all. Pretty much everything at the Whitney looks like it should be art, but leaves no discernible impression. The Biennial is safe enough to ignore.

Jason Rhoades fills a gallery with junk—bottles of Elmer’s Glue, a poster featuring porn star Marilyn Chambers, desk chairs and a sign that reads “Filling with whole green peas by weight not volume”—but there’s nothing chaotic about it. The Grand Machine/THEAREOLA (2002) is immaculately calculated. Mr. Rhoades is a wily artist, but he’s cowed by heady intentions. He’s one example of a generation incapable of acknowledging that art is bigger than the artist. Just what are these people afraid of?

The catalog essayists think something big is afoot. “The revolution can be, must be, will be in each of our gestures all the time.” “Revising the space-time continuum: Where and when is the New World?” “Interconnectedness by way of information technology … is predicated on what in global terms is enormous socioeconomic privilege.” It’s as if exhibiting at (or writing for) the Whitney has itself nothing to do with socioeconomic privilege. Some revolution.

Those interested in the art of painting can forget it. The few painters included—the inexplicably admired Mary Heilmann or the slack and kitschy Karen Kilimnik—are there mainly to prove how bankrupt the art form has become. Photography is slick, shiny and vacuous. You’ll remember photographer Roe Ethridge less for his ambition to orchestrate a “fugue form with multiple voices” than for Camilla (2007), a picture of a sleek young woman wearing a captain’s hat and a fetching red bikini.

Buried inside the Biennial is a barely discernible and potentially rewarding sampling of contemporary sculpture. Heather Rowe’s walk-in installation creates chunky rhythms from two-by-fours, mirror fragments and drywall. Ruben Ochoa channels Hellenic sculpture through the juxtaposition of rebar, chain link and concrete. Charles Long imagines Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Donald Judd entwined in plaster, papier-mâche, garbage and metal stands.

Mitzi Pederson’s thin arabesque of bent wood is minimalism-as-fashion-statement, and practically irresistible. Best of all is Carol Bove’s The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 p.m. (2007). With its glittering maze of hanging bronze rods, it’s true to the title and the poetry implicit in it. Ms. Bove aspires to beauty. In an otherwise desultory mix of art school bric-a-brac, that’s the most shocking thing of all.

“2008 Whitney Biennial” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, until June 1. Mario Naves can be reached at mnaves@observer.com.