We’ve been swimming in the 1960s for decades, replaying the era like a classic-rock album. The artistic movements that came out of that time remain as fixed as the stars: Pop, minimalism, conceptualism, Land Art, feminism. Over the years, curators have mounted endless tributes to Warhol and his circle, Judd and his boxes, Hesse and her synthetic materials. Many of these artists are good, some great. But most of the shows border on boring.

The electrifying first sight when you emerge onto the fifth floor of the Whitney declares that the museum’s new show, “Sixties Surreal,” is not the same old same old. Three enormous double-hump camels by Nancy Graves stand in the gallery. All the tired vocabularies have been thrown out, replaced by a mad, post-minimalist openness and pluralism. In 1969,

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