“Launched more than a century ago, the Venice Biennale should bring together the world’s best new art in a series of national pavilions. In recent years, it has been the Biennale director who has gathered together the most dynamic selection in the old shipworks and the rope factory of the Venetian republic. This year, however, the new director, Francesco Bonami, abandoned any attempt at curating the event himself or presenting a coherent vision of the state of art today.” The result? A mess.
Blog
Venice Just A Symptom Of A Larger Ennui
The problem isn’t that the Venice Biennale is failing to reflect the true diversity of a vibrant and thriving 21st-century art scene, says Blake Gopnik. The problem is that there is no vibrant and thriving scene to reflect. “The show’s so huge, you’ve got to figure that it has its finger on the art world’s pulse. Or that it would, if only there were any pulse to find.” The art world is in a decided lull, and while such cycles of greatness and mediocrity are nothing to worry about in the long term, it seems a bit silly to blame Venice for the lack of good contemporary art. Still, it’s awfully depressing to wander through “room after room, building after building, neighborhood after neighborhood filled with dull retreads of art that’s come before.”
How The Art World Spends Its Summer Vacation
There was a time, not so long ago, when museums were as inactive during the summer months as most TV networks. But today, with global art fairs and insanely high-profile events like the Venice Biennale and Art Basel dominating the summer scene, curators worldwide have no choice but to leap into the fray. With everything from Picasso masterpieces to little-known pen-and-ink drawings waiting to be acquired in Europe, the summer festivals have become a way of life for the wealthy art-collecting elite, and by extension, for the museums who depend upon the generosity of such collectors.
Dana Gioia, Poet Politician
Dana Gioia turned down the Bush administration when they first asked him to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The second time he said yes. “It sounds terribly Jimmy Stewart, but I guess I’m a terribly Jimmy Stewart kind of guy. I felt a certain duty to put aside my own artistic career for however many years and try to rebuild this agency.”
Does Broadway Stifle Real Creativity?
“Musical theater composers used to groom their shows out of town before taking them to Broadway. Now the country’s best new theater composers aren’t sure they want to go to Broadway at all. They feel they can be more creative and more original someplace else – maybe anyplace else.”
Artner: Curators Are Not Artists
Why is the art world more interested in the people who buy art and move it around than we are in the people who actually create it? It’s a dangerous progression, says Alan Artner. “Where the ’80s made stars of purveyors and acquisitors, the ’90s turned the spotlight on curators – and today we live with the consequences: pseudo-intellectualism replacing scholarship, an indifference toward the past, fashionability substituting for merit, the exercise of style instead of analysis, and an elevation of artistic stewardship over art.”
Yo-Yo Ma: How To Be Everything To Everyone
Yo-Yo Ma is the most popular classical musician in the world, at least according to sales figures. But unlike most of the other musicians at the top of that particular list, Ma is neither a gimmicky tenor nor a barely-clothed, barely-classical string quartet. In fact, Yo-Yo Ma may have the answer to the long-pondered question of whether classical music can truly appeal to a mass audience in today’s pop-culture-obsessed world. “A musician needs to know one tradition deeply, to know one room in the mansion of music. And then he needs to have the skill to be able to work with musicians from other traditions – it’s a question of transferability… Working in different musical worlds opens up new areas of expression.”
Museum Insurance Rates Soar 37 Percent
“When Los Angeles County Supervisors on June 3 approved a new insurance policy covering the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, they found that premiums had jumped 37% from the year before. Also, the new policy doesn’t cover most potential losses from terrorism – an exclusion many insurers have added since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Looking For New Direction In Iraq
With Saddam Hussein out of power, and Iraq facing an uncertain future, Iraqi artists are beginning to stare down the barrel of a hard question: without tyranny to rail against, what is our function? “By his own authoritarian standards, Hussein was a supporter of the arts,” with a stable of state-sponsored playwrights, poets, and other artists directed to churn out a constant flow of product which could be compared to the Socialist Realist works of the USSR under Stalin. It was a repressive, hateful system, yes, but it was at least a system. In the post-Hussein Iraq, where American troops roam the streets and the future is on hold, one Baghdad playwright sums up the new paradox: “Whatever is around me is vague, unseen. We don’t know our country’s future; it is hard to write.”
After Saddam – The Inspiration’s Gone
Some artists did well in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Now that he’s gone, they have more freedom to create, and there are galleries ready to show their work. “But painters and sculptors say that for now, the inspiration is gone – stifled by sweltering days with no electricity, snaking gas station lines and sleepless nights defending galleries against looters and arsonists. ‘I ask the artists to make something new, and they tell me they are tired’.”