Art Review: American Pavilion at Venice Biennale Vibrant and Vacuous

Better late than never. I got to the Biennale in Venice last week, five months after it opened, but we in Vermont operate using biblical, even geological time. It’s the 60th iteration of what has become the world’s biggest art fair and the Olympics of the contemporary art world. This year, 88 countries are participating, including Palestine, which calls itself a country. Of course, it isn’t. While pavilions are scattered throughout town, nearly all are in the Giardini, Venice’s public garden park, and the Arsenale, once the shipyard for the Republic of Venice.

The Biennale is a dense experience and, this year, a gloomy, rote, and smug affair. Immigration control, imperialism, capitalism, Israel, and, of course, the Big Satan take a few hits. Otherness is fêted. Xenophobia is panned. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It all seems performative, serious on the surface but insincere. It could have had “Made in Davos” stamped on it. The international mood is so sour, and elites so tentative, that good art was hard to find. Both disaster and prosperity make for art that lasts, though in different ways. Waiting for the other shoe to drop doesn’t.

Better late than never. I got to the Biennale in Venice last week, five months after it opened, but we in Vermont operate using biblical, even geological time. It’s the 60th iteration of what has become the world’s biggest art fair and the Olympics of the contemporary art world. This year, 88 countries are participating, including Palestine, which calls itself a country. Of course, it isn’t. While pavilions are scattered throughout town, nearly all are in the Giardini, Venice’s public garden park, and the Arsenale, once the shipyard for the Republic of Venice.

The Biennale is a dense experience and, this year, a gloomy, rote, and smug affair. Immigration control, imperialism, capitalism, Israel, and, of course, the Big Satan take a few hits. Otherness is fêted. Xenophobia is panned. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It all seems performative, serious on the surface but insincere. It could have had “Made in Davos” stamped on it. The international mood is so sour, and elites so tentative, that good art was hard to find. Both disaster and prosperity make for art that lasts, though in different ways. Waiting for the other shoe to drop doesn’t.