The Whitney Museum's latest exhibition "Sixties Surreal" presents an ambitious showcase featuring 111 artists and six curators, attempting to explore the intersection of Surrealism and 1960s American culture. However, despite its comprehensive scope and visually striking displays, the exhibition struggles to maintain coherence and impact, with its overwhelming breadth ultimately diminishing the power of individual works.

The exhibition opens with a promising premise, as noted art critic Jackson Arn observes that both Surrealism and the 1960s represent universally beloved cultural phenomena of the 20th century. The show is packed with attention-grabbing pieces including cackling wigs, mutant pencil-birds, penis-shaped gravestones, and Nancy Graves' sculptural camels from 1969, which stand prominently at the entrance. These camels, initially created to little fanfare and later acquired by the National Gallery of Canada, symbolically announce the end of Surrealism's "decades of desert-wandering" in American museums.

The exhibition's first gallery, titled "An Other Pop," sets the tone by featuring artists who weren't strictly Surrealist members but shared an obsession with consumer culture's "twinkling junk." The works employ deadpan juxtaposition as their primary weapon, with Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley's film pairing beauty pageantry with baby excrement, Robert Arneson's ceramic telephone offering dual genital imagery, and Martha Rosler's photomontages transforming body parts into kitchen appliances. This approach creates what could be described as "Pop for people tired of Warhol" - work that is slimy and pungent rather than hard and sterile.

The second gallery proves to be the exhibition's strongest section, focusing on "funk" - a term derived from an influential 1967 Berkeley show. This section unites sculptures made from wire, wood, metal, nylon, fabric, and plaster in a cohesive "squelch," featuring Louise Bourgeois' dangling cocoon, Michael Todd's bulbed, bug-like pods, Kenneth Price's green egg, and one of Yayoi Kusama's phallus-feathered chairs. The curation here successfully gives even apparent outliers like Miyoko Ito's striped abstract oil painting a mucous-like quality that wouldn't be apparent in isolation.

Television emerges as a crucial third character alongside the titular Sixties and Surrealism, serving alternately as villain and ally throughout the exhibition. The medium, which attracted more viewers on any given night than art galleries received all year, appears as both inspiration and competition for artists. This televisual influence is evident in works by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Shawn Walker, Paul Thek's "Television Analyzations" paintings, and Luis Jiménez's fiberglass sculpture depicting a face bulging through a phosphorescent screen reminiscent of "Videodrome."

However, the exhibition's problems become apparent at its midpoint, where the scope becomes unwieldy across its 134 works. The curatorial net has been cast so wide that virtually any 1960s artwork could potentially qualify for inclusion. Street photography appears through Adger Cowan's sidewalk figures, experimental film is represented by Jack Smith's "Scotch Tape" (1959-62), and even familiar Warhol Pop finds its place. Most telling is the inclusion of Martha Edelheit, a nonagenarian whose Klimt-influenced female nudes prompted her to tell The New York Times, "I don't know why I was asked to be in it - I don't think of anything I do as surreal."

Paradoxically, some of the exhibition's quieter works prove most memorable and impactful. Christina Ramberg's "Shadow Panel," painted in 1972, stands out as a reminder of her undervalued talent. The work presents a cropped female figure showing only a profiled torso and dark undergarments without a face, resembling a Look magazine advertisement but possessing a taut pose that is both erotic and sinister. Unlike much of the exhibition, this piece becomes more rather than less shocking with prolonged viewing.

The exhibition ultimately reveals a broader irony about 1960s art and its relationship to media culture. Many artists, in responding to television's influence, inadvertently recreated television's weaknesses - producing work that caught attention initially but faded quickly. Peter Saul's X-rated cartoon "Saigon" (1967) exemplifies this phenomenon; two years after its creation, news of the My Lai massacre broke, proving that reality was even more shocking than the nightmare Saul had conjured.

The exhibition raises relevant questions for contemporary art, particularly regarding which current artists can create work that captures the moment in ways that transcend momentary impact. In an era characterized by numbing media saturation and what the critic describes as "bloodthirsty stupidity," the challenge remains as relevant today as it was in the 1960s. "Sixties Surreal" serves as both celebration and cautionary tale about the difficulties of artistic response to overwhelming cultural stimuli.