Glenn Ligon’s Self-Referential Elegies

Glenn Ligon, 50, the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum, is a Bronx-born African American who has devoted his career to making word-based art that elegizes his reflections on being gay and black in America. His technical range is severely limited, and for all the inarguable righteousness of his project, I cannot help but feel his work is overly self-referential, lacking the universality of great art.