I went right through the biennale—all the 20 or so national pavilions, the usual greatest hits survey in the Italian pavilion, and the always enormous cutting-edge-young-artists pot pourri in the Arsenale, without finding what I wanted: something that would give me a glimmer of hope. I was now in the Chinese pavilion, the first ever in the biennale's 110-year history. The sign at the entrance posed this question: "What is the ontology of a national pavilion?" With these words a brand new layer of self-referentiality had been added to the already top-heavy structure of contemporary art. A few decades ago this process had begun with site-specific art which "interrogated" the space of the gallery, then progressed to art which "questioned" the economics of the gallery, and recently attained new heights when one Thai artist exhibited reconstructions of the empty exhibition spaces of his previous exhibitions as a retrospective. Perhaps, with the Chinese pavilion's exploration of itself, art's theoretical edifice would finally topple over.
The sprawling Venice biennale is intended to be a celebratory survey of all that is great and new in contemporary art, but it left me feeling depressed. It wasn't the quality of the art. There was bad stuff and good stuff. The bad stuff included the repetitive and dated Gilbert and George show at the British pavilion—more of those brightly painted glass panels, fusty Dennis Potter Britishness and faux-affection for working-class kids. The good stuff included a brilliant Ed Ruscha installation at the American pavilion. The legendary pop artist has returned to old subjects after an interval of 20 years, repainting buildings he had first painted in the 1980s—the new ones becoming poetic images of the arrival of globalisation on the edges of American towns.
My depression wasn't even caused by a lack of laughs. At the German pavilion, six men and women dressed as museum guards shimmied across the floor, clicking their fingers and singing: "This art is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary." It was the latest work from Tino Sehgal, whose tiresome and predictable critique of the capitalist art market is compensated for by his dadaist sense of humour.
Nor was there any lack of glamour. I went to the German party. To get there I walked across to the other side of Venice, through a causeway lit by terracotta oil lamps and into an open air club where Kraftwerk were playing live. The champagne and vodka flowed like water and my old friend, the A-list art photographer Andreas Gursky, was in attendance. I drank a cocktail in the Danieli, Venice's most beautiful old hotel, where the big art collectors stay. Next to me a grey-haired man shouted into his mobile phone, "Don't you know how rich I am? I don't care what it costs. Get me a car to get around in." Over on the other side of the canal, Microsoft's Paul Allen had moored his yacht, which, I was told, has an onboard surgeon, presumably in case any large works of art fall on top of him.
I didn't need a surgeon, but paracetamol would have been useful. The problem was how to make any sense of the biennale. There seemed to be so much more art than there used to be. The Arsenale was full of names from South America, India and Asia, which I began furiously memorising so as not to embarrass myself in front of other critics. Globalisation has created the global art market—and now people from the newly emerging capitalist economies are rich enough to produce and collect contemporary art. Artists from developing countries send out messages that make you feel bad if you are white and European. Usually their work invokes the history of exploitation by the west (in the art world, this is called "confronting us with their cultural difference"), yet these artists are desperate to be recognised within the context of western contemporary art. The biennale was crammed with video art, much of which consisted of little more than news clips with a German voiceover asking "Does the local still exist, or is there only the global?" All that this revealed was that the curators of art shows have still not worked out the difference between a work of art and the rushes for an unbroadcastable documentary.
The mission of an art critic when confronted with the biennale is, of course, to absorb everything and then produce an analysis of where art is heading. I was depressed because I couldn't do this. But I wasn't the only one. The survey at the Italian pavilion was weakly entitled "The Experience of Art." The show at the Arsenale had a name that was only a slight improvement—"Always a Little Further." The curator told us that her exhibition was "a field open to distinct practices within which one can fulfil the desire to exchange experiences, ideas, thoughts, or even to provoke them." So the big idea was that there was no big idea, right? "Why can't they just call it Stuff-I-Like?" the editor of the Art Newspaper, Cristina Ruiz, asked me imploringly. The topography of contemporary art is like the streetmap of Venice itself. There is no logic to it. Everyone gets lost. Dark and narrow alleyways twist and turn in uncertain directions. Sometimes you turn a corner and suddenly end up in a sunny square with a beautiful church. Other routes you follow end up in cul-de-sacs that stink of urine. And the whole edifice seems in permanent danger of sinking.
