In the heat of the summer, Venice’s main public garden, known as the Giardini, is usually a quiet and sleepy place. Away from St Mark’s Square, beyond the Arsenale, on the spit of land that faces towards the Lido, it is too far off the beaten track to attract many tourists. But once every two years, in early June, the place becomes a hive of activity. The pavilions of multifarious design that line the park’s avenues are suddenly filled with works of art, the focus of attention for a multitude of visitors. Artists and their dealers, critics and curators, middlemen and hangers-on, descend on the Giardini in their thousands.
The occasion is the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and largest festival of contemporary art. This year’s event, which opened last week, proved to be the biggest and possibly the most bewildering ever. The line between the official Biennale and its fringe events has become increasingly blurred, with a truly mind-boggling quantity of ancillary exhibitions taking place in the city itself, in various palazzi, buildings and warehouses on and off the Grand Canal. There is a striking exhibition of work by Richard Hamilton, the father of British Pop Art, at the Fondazione Bevilacqua; a new show of work by the grand old man of Russian contemporary art, Ilya Kabakov, at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia; while the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is playing host to an exhibition setting the works of the late Joseph Beuys next to those of Matthew Barney, inventor of a genre of performance and video art that might best be described as Baroque American Dada. In addition, a multitude of dealers have staged all kinds of unofficial exhibitions of work by their leading artists. At a conservative estimate, it would take a single individual at least a month just...
