Better late than never. Last month I finally got to Venice to see the Biennale, which closes this weekend. If you’re a fast sprinter, you can get there, too, but if you haven’t seen the 60th edition of the world’s most prestigious contemporary-art extravaganza and won’t, today’s story starts with my reassurance that you can brook the lack unscarred. “The Sun’ll Come Up Tomorrow,” as Little Orphan Annie sang, and she never went to the Biennale, at least until she met Daddy Warbucks and got a suite at the Gritti Palace.
It’s not the Reparations Biennale, though it sometimes feels like it. Or the You Bad, Xenophobe Biennale, though that’s implicit. It’s not a dud, either. It’s elegantly done, I saw lots of work by artists I didn’t know, and what better backdrop than Venice? It’s just that, intellectually, this gondola treads water.
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