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This essay offers a critical review of the 51st Venice Biennial (12 June 6 November 2005), situating it in the context of the recent history of the Venice Biennial. The review identifies a dual institutional structure (national pavilions and international survey shows) in the Venice Biennial, and argues that this constitutes a "transitional conjuncture" overdetermined by the radicalization and pluralization of art practices (performances, site-specific installations, etc.), the privatization of art funding in the form of corporate sponsorship, and the global proliferation and consolidation of the institutional form of the biennial-biannual survey exhibitions of transnational art practices. The review argues that, while a number of artists and curators have succeeded in the past and in this year's edition in producing self-reflective and acutely critical art works in relation to the older structure of the Venice Biennial where art was displayed and appropriated in national pavilions, the two survey exhibitions of the 2005 edition (curated by Rosa Martínez and María de Corral) have failed to reflect critically upon the new, corporate-sponsored institutional form of the biennial that the Venice Biennial is moving toward.
Key Words: 51st Venice Biennial, Culture Industry, Institutional Critique, Critical Art Practices, Spectacle as a Commodity, Value of Art
The very architectural forms that populate the Giardini of the Venice Biennial, the main garden where the permanent national pavilions are located, inadvertently reveal the traces of the overdetermined history of this oldest of all biennials. The neoclassical splendor of the buildings of the fin-de-siècle imperial powers such as Great Britain, France, Germany (rebuilt in the 1930s), and Italy, the modernist slickness of the pavilions of the established nation-states of the proverbial North -Sweden and Norway, Australia, Spain, and Japan and, of course, the late imperial Palladian style of the U.S. pavilion (built in the 1930s) make it crystal clear, at least for this fascinated viewer, that there is indeed a geopolitically constituted pecking order in the world of art. Any nation-state that does not have a permanent pavilion, yet wishes to participate in the Biennial (e.g., Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asian Republics, Armenia, Wales, India), has to rent a space in the city, most probably in one of the overpriced empty palazzos that are struggling to stay afloat (in most cases literally)...