MAY AS WELL GO TO MOMA:

It is the spell of privilege, of permanent adolescence, of living life high above common concern and plastering it all with bongwater symbols and sayings that The Journey Home tries to cast. As non-fungible tokens of grift and graft -- such considerations dwell beyond the event horizon of what you see on the gallery walls. Instead what you get are tattoo-like symbols of snakes, birds, dragons and Celtic writing all stenciled in gold pen. You read the saying by Joseph Campbell that "we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path." The pre-socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea informs us that "one path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is." This one, also written in gold pen, appears on a painting featuring a bald female figure resembling the V'Ger robot from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

When Biden descends from this astral plane, he lets his paints run in bloody patterns. He drips out pointillist landscapes trip-trap. His blows pigments into floral patterns, in particular across "Untitled #13" -- arrangements that are inoffensive but inauthentic. The wild artist is falsely tamed.

You find a sweep of styles and techniques presented here across two floors, none of it dated, none with any sense of direction. But those works labeled "mixed media" seem to convey a truer artist. Here through computer manipulation, Biden has distorted images, mostly of himself. He prints them out and doodles on top of them. When I entered the exhibition, there was a velvet rope closing off the downstairs half of the show. At some point it came down and I descended. A gallerist followed close behind. "One of us has to be downstairs with you," he explained, "just in case...you never know." Here, in "Hockney," we catch a glimpse of the pool of Biden's Hollywood Hills home -- and Ms. Cohen-Biden's derriere floating therein. There it is again, in "Self Portrait," behind some crystal schlock, another bikini-clad babe next to Biden, all covered in paint.

In Freudian psychoanalysis, it is said that an anal stage follows the oral stage in early-childhood development. Biden has lived life as the anal-explosive son, but many of his paint-the-dots numbers are fussy, restrained, retentive. It seems more honest to start with those digital images that made him famous and manipulate them further, as he does here, pouring paint or wherever else on the end result. If your art is crap, it's best not to pull the handle.

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