Rising nationalism and falling funding are reshaping the Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 as the world’s first international art exhibition, emerged intact from two world wars. And then in 1974, it almost fell apart. Buffeted by the student riots of the late 1960s, by conflict over how it should be managed and by the beginnings of the oil-price crisis, the world’s biggest art exhibition took a leap into the void.

Throwing out its traditions, it closed the national pavilions that had been its mainstay since the early 1900s, abandoned the art-historical surveys and the grand prizes and moved the whole programme from the summer to the autumn. Under a new director, the saturnine Italian politician Carlo Ripa di Meana, the 1974 exhibition instead staged a series of explicitly political protests at the Chilean dictatorship that had overthrown Salvador Allende’s government a year earlier. But the director’s revolution didn’t last long. Conservative curators, encouraged by Italian government officials, soon had his changes reversed.

Now, half a century after Ripa di Meana’s attempted revolt, some people are asking again whether the Venice Biennale needs to change. As nationalism in some countries harks back to the politics of the early 1930s and thousands sign a petition against Israel’s participation, are the national pavilions past their sell-by date? In a world with globalisation under pressure, is an international exhibition curated by a single expert the appropriate way of representing the views of artists from around the globe? Others, meanwhile, are seeking answers to older questions: what is art for? What is the Venice Biennale for?

By 1978, the Biennale had backed away from revolution and was easing itself into the shape we know now. It reopened the national pavilions in the Giardini, began welcoming dozens of shows by countries as far apart as Afghanistan, Albania and Azerbaijan in other sites around the city, and eventually created a vast international exhibition in the Arsenale overseen by a single curator around a central theme. This year more than 55 national pavilions have already been announced, including for the first time Ethiopia, Tanzania and Timor-Leste, and there are 331 artists in the main exhibition — a third more than in 2022.

Alain Servais, a Belgian collector who began his investment banking career in 1987 and now visits more than 50 major art events a year, says, “I needed art to escape the rat race. But art doesn’t make any sense if it isn’t linked to broader society.” For Servais, and others who follow it closely, the Biennale is a messy human encounter that should create serendipity and surprise. “It is truly a United Nations of the art world,” he says. “A world seen through art.”

The Venice Biennale holds a particular glamour for many people, not least because the city is so beautiful and so decrepit. “There’s an urgency to get there because it’s in peril,” says Emily Wei Rales, co-founder of the Glenstone Museum outside Washington DC. For many of its 800,000-plus visitors, the Venice Biennale balances art and aspiration with curiosity about the world past and present.

The main role of the Venice Biennale — any biennale — is to challenge the status quo, jumbling up artists and artworks that together will raise questions and make new connections. “It should be forging new stories in public, making art history much more complex and nuanced than it ever has before,” says Maria Balshaw, director of Tate.

To do that, the Biennale needs to make sure of three things. The first is to act as a pushback against the art market. The commercial art world has a weakness for standardisation and conformity because that is easy to buy and sell. Yet art can be surprising, complex and annoying. So the biggest imperative should be to focus on the quality and originality of the works of art on show. “You don’t want to see work that you can see everywhere else,” says Servais.

The Biennale presents itself as an exhibition, although from 1942 to 1968 it had a sales office which took a 10 per cent cut on all art sold during the exhibition. That commercial activity is long in the past, but art dealers and galleries are aware of its appeal to rich people. Often they will rent a palazzo and show a favoured artist. “It’s presented as an exhibition, but behind that there’s all this background activity,” says Rales. “Trades happen. You just don’t hear about them.”

As state funding for national pavilions has become tighter, auction houses and other luxury businesses have stepped in to fund the gap; the British pavilion this year is sponsored by Burberry for the second time; art-fair group Frieze is co-sponsoring.

The second is to avoid regarding the national pavilions as bastions of political chauvinism and more as emissaries from a complex world. The US pavilion, which is modelled on Thomas Jefferson’s porticoed slave plantation, Monticello, took on a whole new meaning in 2022 when Simone Leigh remodelled the building to resemble a clay hut with a thatched roof.

This year, the Nigerian pavilion has been taken over by the soon to open Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City. The aim, says Phillip Ihenacho, the director, is to show that far from being a dusty repository of restituted bronzes, MOWAA wants to become a living, breathing centre for working artists, an engine of job creation in a country where almost half the population is under the age of 15. Artists raised more than a third of the $1.5mn cost of the pavilion.

Not all pavilions have a positive story to tell, though. In 2024, Russia will be absent for the second time running. In 2022 its shuttered pavilion was shrouded in dust and swirling leaves; this year it has offered the space to Bolivia. Israel, too, came under pressure to abandon its 2024 Biennale plans after nearly 15,000 artists and cultural workers signed a petition demanding that it be excluded from the Biennale, before Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, said Israel would be represented. A proposal for a Palestinian exhibition was rejected.

The third imperative is to ensure that the curating of the international exhibition not only puts interesting artists side by side, but offers a vital and illuminating addition to the story it is telling. In 2022, curator Cecilia Alemani interspersed the work of contemporary artists with small discrete historical shows. These acted like sugar-plums, adding depth and flavour to her confection about Surrealism from around the world. This year, Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, is determined to impose his own vision and ensure that the international exhibition will be one to remember.

Venice needs to consider problems beyond itself too. At the 2017 Biennale, François Pinault, art collector and owner of Christie’s auction house, threw a lavish party across the water from the newly restored Punta della Dogana where he was hosting a vast Damien Hirst exhibition. Hours before Pinault’s VIP guests began to arrive, his staff became anxious lest the dozens of mature lemon trees brought in to decorate the venue appear less than fruitful. The order went out for hundreds of plump extra lemons to be hand-tied to their branches.

Glasses were raised that night to the enduring power of art to free the imagination and to effect change. But nothing illustrated the contrast between the rich and poor, between artists and the art world that follows them, than the sight the following morning of hundreds of lemons bobbing in the lagoon around the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Today, such waste would be regarded as even more distasteful than it was seven years ago, before the pandemic. Conspicuous consumption, narrow intellectual conformity and a mulish disregard for the future of the planet will do for the Venice Biennale more thoroughly than any disagreement about globalisation and national pavilions or whether art should be funded by the state, philanthropy or the market.

April 20-November 24, labiennale.org