Andrew Graham-Dixon reports from the Venice Biennale 1990 on porn-queens, carrier bags, truisms and prizes

Some things never change. The 44th Venice Biennale, like every other one in living memory, opened last week in a state of chaos. The difference this time was that the most vocal complaints came not from the thousands of curators, dealers, artists, critics and collectors who had converged on the few watery square miles of the Serenissima for the occasion, but from the Biennale's director. ''The difficult life of this event,'' Giovanni Carandente announced last Tuesday, ''has reached a critical point.'' He was referring to the lack of funds that had led to the cancellation of several of the event's scheduled exhibitions, but there were other grounds, too, for unease. Last week's chief talking-points turned out to be a carrier bag, a dead art movement and the relationship between a New York neo-Pop artist and an Italian porno queen.

The Venice Biennale 1990 will be remembered, among other things, for its non-events. Apart from the exhibitions that Signore Carandente never got the money to stage, there was ''Ubi Fluxus Ibi Motus'', a show planned to take place on the island of the Giudecca on day one of the Biennale. The invitation card stated that ''During the all night will take place Fluxus performance''. Those who turned up during the all night found themselves in the company of one empty beer bottle and some discarded bubble-wrap on a deserted stretch of quayside. Fluxus, a movement that was born in the early 1960s, has been described as ''Post-Happening Art''. This was presumably Post-Post-Happening. Nothing happened. Fluxus was declared dead at 2.30am by five would-be visitors to the event as they waited for a rare late-night vaporetto to take them back across the waters to St Mark's Square....

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