I usually give this blog a rest on weekends, but since I’m in Venice I blogged right on through, fully aware that the majority of readers don’t check back til Monday. Now that you’re here, if you care to you can backtrack to find the posts on the U.S. and British pavilions, among other things. Now on to France.
One of my best …
At the Giardini, the wooded park where the Biennale’s national pavilions are all set out in world’s fair style, the British pavilion occupies what you might call a high ground of the Old World. As you approach, France is on its left, Germany on the right. The salmon brick and white marble neo-classical pavilion, with its columns and …
It’s Sunday, the day that the Biennale opens to the public for a run that continues through November 21. The rain is long gone but the high summer weather is edging in. By August the mid-afternoon heat will be Egyptian but for now it’s tolerable. It’s a good day to sit for a while at a shaded table and watch the tourists snapping …
Let’s finish that conversation I started a few posts back with Guillermo Kuitca, 46, the Buenos Aires-based painter who is representing his country this year at the Argentine pavilion at the Teatro Ateneo and who also has 38 canvases in the International group show at the Arsenale. We were talking about his exhibition at the Argentine …
During Biennale season, Venice fills with small exhibitions that aren’t part of the official show but have its blessing. Taken together they make a kind of citywide art fair. As you lug your day bag over the canals and little streets it’s easy to drift across something like an inflated rubber iceberg resting incongruously on some sun …
To wrap up Friday, I went with friends to a party for the Brazil pavilion being given at the home of two wealthy Bolognese collectors, Marino and Paola Golinelli, who also keep a Palazzo on the Grand Canal. (You would too if you could.)
Their home is worth taking a moment to describe because it epitomizes the surprises in store behind …
It turns out to be something of a disappointment. Gonzalez-Torres was just 38 when he died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1996. It’s unusual but not unprecedented for a nation to be represented at the Biennale by an artist who’s no longer living. Robert Smithson, who died in a helicopter crash in 1973, was the U.S. representative nine …
This Biennale is a big moment for the Argentine painter Guillermo Kuitca. In Rob Storr’s international show at the Arsenale he has no fewer than 38 round canvases that take up two large walls from top to bottom. Those are part of a series called “Diarios”, each representing a period of weeks or months in his life since 1994.
He’s …
The end of the day is party hour at the Biennale. Last night there was a choice between another gathering at the Guggenheim Museum on the Grand Canal and a party for the Tate on the yacht of Ella Fontanals Cisneros, the founder of Miami Art Central, the contemporary art museum . I talked with her for a while about the challenges still …
At the press conference for the Biennale media previews, Rob Storr observed that “we are living in pretty terrible times.” He also said that his big international show, which takes up the enormous main building of the Arsenale, has in it “reflections of that history.” To put it mildly. In fact, the first half or more of his group …
Venice in the pouring rain. Forget the Venice of Caneletto and Monet. Think Turner and Whistler. Sometimes it stops for a while. The birds chirp tentaively. Then the skies open again. Myself and the rest of the Migratory Art Herd all huddle under our umbrellas, trying to keep our catalogues dry.
The Biennale was founded in 1895 as …
The migratory art herd is all here. (That of course includes me.) Lots of women in Prada. Lots of guys in Dieter Sprocket gear. (Shaved head, glasses, black suit — hey wait; that describes me, too.) And though this isn’t a sales fair, lots of shop talk. Coming up in a few hours, the press conference to open the media preview …
Hope to have this lemonade stand back up and running by late tomorrow. Where am I headed this time? Well, it’s a place that been called “the thinking man’s Disneyland.”
Though lately, it’s also been turning into artworld Wrestlemania.
