Martha Stewart meets Kropotkin.

IF one learns anything at all from years of going to the Whitney, it is that you shouldn't read too much into its Biennial exhibitions. Though widely seen as the last word on our visual culture over the previous two years, in fact these shows say more about their curators. Politics was rampant in 1993 because Elisabeth Sussman wanted it that way, while formalism resurfaced two years later because the torch had been passed to Klaus Kertess.

And what is the gist of its latest incarnation? One step forward, two steps back, seems to be the guiding principle here. Thus, while the 1995 exhibition seemed, in its (relative) formalist sobriety, to step decisively out of the morass of jammering message art that had characterized the 1993 installment, the present version offers a "correction," with message once again gaining the ascendancy over mere form.

At the same time, we see a different kind of political art from that of 1993. It has been softened and sweetened in a way that does indeed reflect changes in the art world itself. In one sense, the exhibition is the bastard child of its two immediate predecessors. Whereas one was largely political and the other largely formalist, the present exhibition is political and formalist, according to the taste of Lisa Phillips and her assistant, Louise Neri. It is a compromise that recalls those spreads in glamour magazines where successful women professionals, preferably with good feminist credentials, are seen modeling the latest designs, as if to prove that one can be a prominent career woman without looking like a tractor, and a follower of fashion without being a bubblehead. In the latest version of eating one's cake and having it, the Whitney proves that one can be politically engage and also well turned out: Martha Stewart meets Kropotkin.

Four years ago, in the most rampantly political Biennial anyone had ever seen, there was something literally smelly and unclean about the art on display. Everything from a tar-covered station-wagon to Sue Williams's puddle of simulated vomit was oversized and almost aggressively inept. Now the art has become small and dainty and much of it comes within sniffing distance of mediocrity. Even Sue Williams, heeding the dictates of the market, is behaving herself: in her pleasant pastel abstractions, the recurring motif of genitalia will be visible only to those who are closer to the paintings than they should be. In a similar vein, the famous Dadaist Richard Prince continues to rehash borscht-belt jokes scribbled (with the requisite ironic distance, naturally) onto canvas, but he has joined these to quite unobjectionable abstractions. What his point was in doing so is, of course, another issue altogether. One sees the self-same process taking place in the once furious vulgarity of Lari Pittman, who made such a splash four years ago. Now this artist has become, well, delicately vulgar. Meanwhile, Kerry James Marshall's cutsey engrafting of black children onto a context of Middle America, with white picket fences and manicured lawns, is obviously supposed to be the last word in post-modern cheek, even though much the same thing was seen in the last Biennial in the work of Roger Colescott. But what is so surprising here is how hard the artist is working to be, if not good, at least salable. Gone, clearly, are the days when dealers could sell anything to anyone.

Some of the most accomplished art, from the point of view of craft, comes in the form of the reconstituted Persian miniatures of Shahzia Sikander and the pastels of Francesco Clemente. No one seemed too bothered that neither was American. But then, the Whitney, though chartered to display only American art, has been chafing under that restraint for some years now.

In every Whitney Biennial there seems to be one cross-over object --like William Wegman's unnecessarily celebrated dog-in-drag photographs -- which, notwithstanding its post-modern attitude, manages to get into all the papers and to attract the camera crews. Whenever classes are brought to the exhibition to be taught that museums aren't threatening and can be fun, it's the first thing they see. This year the honor goes to Tony Oursler, whose literally talking heads steal the show. With sophisticated video equipment, he manages to project faces onto small fabric heads in such a way as to endow their inanimate sackcloth with vitality. Already the art world is uneasy. Cries of gimmickry have been heard all the way from SoHo to 59th Street: Oursler is starting to repeat himself. One has seen it all before. An artist who, at this late date, thinks of creating something that someone might want, for example, to see is just not playing by the rules.