In the brilliant Romanian pavilion, the artists Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus have paid a troupe of performers to act out an anthology of works from a full century of Venice Biennales, presented in the old-fashioned mode of tableaux vivants.  This photo captures them enacting one of Jeff Koons's images of himself having sex with La Cicciolina, the porn star who was then his wife, as shown in Venice in 1990. At other moments the troupe performed the 1924 "Black Circle" by Kasimir Malevich (by lying in a circle on the ground) and a 2007 piece about the political neutrality of the Venice Biennale (a single dancer simply stood there, looking noncommittal). They also gave us charades of a national hero on horseback, in Venice in 1897, and of Edward Hopper's "Hotel Lobby" from the 1952 Biennale (some performers crouched as the lobby's chairs). On first encounter, the Romanians' anthology felt like a wonderful one-liner. On sticking with it, as I did for close to an hour, all sorts of profundities opened up. It came to be about all art as depending on human actions, about how interpretation always trumps the objects themselves, about how everything artists make can be leveled-out to a single cultural genre, and about the "migrant labor" of artists at any Biennale. (This last point I've cribbed from the project's rather good introductory text.) I also came to realize that Pirici and Pelmus's single "gesture" required as much craft and care as any high-realist painting: The performers have memorized all the dozens of works in their anthology, and will be presenting them daily through November. 

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A still from "Blindly", a coruscating video from the brilliant Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, in the Biennale's group show. If Zmijewski's greatest video showed deaf people learning to grunt out a Bach cantata, this more recent one shows the messes blind people make when asked to paint. In my full review of the Biennale in this week's Newsweek, I argue that Zmijewski's video represents the dilemma at the heart of all artmaking today, including in the Venice show: A sense of absolute pointlessness and powerlessness, and a determination nevertheless to go on making art. My review argues that the Biennale's group show valiantly tries, and notably fails, to return art to a time when it had a real function in life. Zmijewski's video acts as the show's own declaration of that failure, but also as an insistence that the effort of artmaking, whatever the results, counts as a success.
It so happens that there's research on blind artists that bears this out.

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I magine a single work of art that captured a sense that, after all these decades of trying, modern art hasn’t managed to change the world, or even much affect it. A sense that, for all its variety, modern art—maybe most of Western art for the last 500 years—has been nothing more than a series of moves in a series of games, like clever new plays in clever new versions of football. And imagine that this imaginary artwork managed to condense all the longings of every artist, curator, and critic for an art that was much more than such games, for an art that truly mattered. And then imagine that this work packaged that longing as one giant sigh, from knowing it could never be more than longing.

That artwork is this year’s Venice Biennale, the 55th edition of the world’s most prestigious aesthetic pulse taking, which opened to the public Saturday. At the heart of the this year’s Biennale is a giant group exhibition called The Encyclopedic Palace, put together by Italian curator Massimiliano Gioni, on secondment from his day job at the New Museum in New York. And Gioni’s group show, more focused and polished than any previous year’s, utters the pungent sigh I’ve described.

Rather than offer up a sampling of the best and brightest work being made today, the show digs back into the last 100 years or so of making art, looking for all the times when art has had ambitions beyond merely being good. At the show’s beginning, in the Central Pavilion in the Biennale gardens, there is a room dedicated to Carl Jung’s Red Book, the manuscript in which the famous analyst recorded the images he saw in his dreams and that he thought would grant new access to our hive mind. (The drawings are vaguely medieval and corny, like something out of Game of Thrones: “Bring forth the Red Book of necromancy! We shall conjure the spirits of Targaryens past.”)

Anri Sala's "Ravel Ravel Unravel" project, representing France at this year's Biennale, is the best thing I've seen so far, and one of the best I've ever seen here. I'd need thousands of words to get at its complexities, but here are a few hundred to get us started.
Sala's premise is relatively simple: He gets two great, heroic (male) musicians to record the concerto that Maurice Ravel wrote in 1930 for a pianist who'd lost his right hand in the Great War.  In a grand central room of Sala's pavilion, two stacked screens show gorgeous, hi-def footage of each player's left hand as it strikes the keyboard. Although the pianists begin their solos at the same time, and the orchestra recorded with each is identical, their interpretations vary enough for the sights and sounds of their playing to pass in and out of sync.  In one smaller side room – the first space you come to in the building – a smaller projection shows a close-up on a woman's face in extreme concentration; the soundtrack makes you think that she's playing the piano, except that her playing seems wildly distorted and fractured.  In the building's final space, encountered after the main screening room, the camera pulls back and the woman's task is explained: She's standing at a pair of turntables, like a Hip Hop DJ, using her fingers to stop and start a pair of vinyl discs that bear the pianists' performances. Her goal is clearly to reconcile the two recordings so that their solos can be heard in sync, but the result is a series of hesitations and distortions in the sound as she "scratches" the twin records. The harder she works to make things right, the worse the result.
So much for the premise. Read on for some of my reactions:

– There's a sense of Sala "replacing" the missing hand of the original pianist, by doubling the players. Of course, his new, hybrid musician is a strange double lefty. A fractured body is healed, but its musicmaking is further damaged.

– There's a fascinating tension between the visually powerful moments when we see the pianists' hands flying across their keyboards, and the visually placid moments when those hands are at rest – despite the aural frenzy of the orchestra playing its parts offscreen.

– Surprisingly, the doubled recording of the Ravel is not cacophonous at all. At most, the piece underlines a common notion of Ravel as predicting later, more strenuously modern music. What you hear could be Ravel reworking his own thoughts on music, if he'd lived into the 1960s.

– There's also a sense that counterpoint, which has been Western classical music's most notable feature, has been turned into the aesthetic principle behind Sala's contemporary visual art. It's hard to sort out the echoes and repeats in Ravel's original score and the echoes and repeats introduced by Sala.

– The woman's attempt to sort out the musical jumble comes care of DJ culture, often seen as standing in opposition to the classical tradition and for a rejection of Bachian order. Yet her two hands, delicately working the turntables, come off as strangely close to the pianists' twinned left hands at  their keyboards. (Could someone write a piece for a one-handed turntablist?)

– The project is about recording and playback technologies – visual and aural – as much as about live performance. Sala uses different speaker arrays in each room as well as different sound baffling (the central room has foam panels that eliminate almost all echoes off its walls). The separate content in each room is matched, and complicated, by different means of reproduction.

– There's a notable contrast between our sense of being in the presence of intuitive choices being made, as we watch each pianist do his particular thing, and our realization that the actual footage that we watch and hear is set down for good, without the possibility of alteration. In what sense, then, are we actual witnesses to improvisation?

–There's also a lovely match between the way the pianists seem to improvise, but within the narrowest of limits (hence their being often in sync), and the improvisations of the cameramen as they follow the movement of the musicians' hands, pull their focus to different parts of the keyboard or drag our attention from flying fingers of the left hands to right hands not moving at all. And all along we're never sure how much freedom there really is for either musician or cameraman to stray from a script set by Sala – and Ravel. This, you could say, is the tension at the heart of much of the West's performative art.

– There are gender implications. The piece underlines the "maleness" of the Romantic tradition in music – the concerto's one-handedness was "produced" by a war – and then positions its woman as stuck between gigantic male egos, hopelessly attempting to reconcile them.

– A final marker of the success of this strange collaboration between Sala and the long-dead Ravel: Despite the extreme complexity of the piece, visitors stayed riveted for longer than they ever would in front of a painting or photo, or with a classical album. There's no plot, but visitors don't want to lose track of it.

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A visitor looks at Ellen Altfest’s “The Back”, painted over the course of many months of full-time labor in 2008 and 2009 and now one of the highpoints in the Biennale’s curated group show. Although the exhibition was stuffed with painting, most of it was work of the “imagination”, with all the attendant clichés. Not much of it had strong ties to the world. Although I have no interest in tired high-realist technique, Altfest’s studies of the male nude, said to have been painted from life, seem less about the final result than about the tireless observation that got her there.  And there is some sense that all her looking and painting and looking and painting turns out to be a sisyphean task; reality refuses to cooperate with our desire to absorb it.  Altfest's work may be closer to conceptual art than to standard painting: the canvases put on view are simply documentation of an absurdist process.

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Richard Mosse’s photographs capture the darkness of war in vivid color: warlords and rebels armed with AK-47s are tinted with bubble gum and magenta pinks. Stripped skulls lie in the blood-red grass of rolling hills and the haunting stares of huddled women are framed with dusky purples. It’s an uncomfortable yet magnetic paradox, which resonates through Mosse’s work. Quite literally, he’s depicting the conflict in Africa’s Democratic Republic of the Congo in a whole new light.

The secret behind the surreal color palette is Mosse’s use of the discontinued Kodak film, Aerochrome. Developed by military surveillance during the Cold War to detect enemy camouflage, the film registers the invisible spectrum of infrared light, tingeing portraits and landscapes with psychedelic hues of pink, red, and lilac. “It made sense to me metaphorically. This war is a hidden tragedy, and in that sense it’s invisible,” Mosse explained. “Making the conflict visible for ordinary people to see is at the heart of this project.”

From June 1 to November 24, 32-year-old Mosse will represent his home country of Ireland at the 55th-annual Venice Biennale with his latest work, The Enclave. Anna O’Sullivan, director of the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny and Ireland’s commissioner curator for Venice 2013, describes the project as a “highly ambitious six-channel multimedia installation on the subject of the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” Mosse says that the exhibition will blend film, photography, and sound to create a hauntingly immersive experience of the eastern region’s devastated villages.

This is a still from Yuri Ancarani’s video called “Da Vinci”, possibly the most striking piece from the Arsenale group exhibition curated by the New Museum’s Massimiliano Gioni. All the video gives us, more or less, is a fiber-optic, surgeon’s-eye view of the inside of someone’s gut, as it undergoes a laparoscopic operation. We watch, from inside and among folds of offal, as the surgeon’s tiny robotic tools push their way in, cut things up, burn things off then sew up what’s left. I’m afraid that the “magic” performed by the operating room’s Da Vinci Si model robot, and the real work that it does in the world, makes the best of art’s meager efforts seem almost impotent. This, you could say, is the true issue at the heart of Gioni’s ambitious curating … but you’ll have to wait for my upcoming Newsweek review to get all the – gory – details.

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First George W. Bush paints watercolors, then Bea Arthur Naked takes over the internet, now Serena Williams is the latest famous person to get in to the art scene. In a tweet sent on Thursday, Serena said she was taking art classes in Paris ahead of the French Open, and that this piece was from her "Expressions" series and is called "Xpressions."

Why does everyone have to paint the Queen looking as horrible as possible? Is it part of the job description to render Her Majesty looking as if she has been subjected to a particularly nasty bout of poisoning, a la Victor Yushchenko? Or is this simply yet another attempt by the artist to get past the cloak of royalty?

The latest effort is by artist Nicky Phipps - who actually previously painted one of the few visually pleasing pictures of William and Harry - and is one of a book of six stamps being issued by the Royal Mail in the UK to celebrate 60 years since the Queen was crowned.

Dante’s ancient footsteps have been easily traceable in Florence since his exile in 1302, but it has taken Dan Brown to ignite true Dante fever in the Tuscan capital.

Who cares if Brown veers slightly off course in his interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy in his latest novel, Inferno? Art historians and literary academics might be up in arms, but blurring the facts into fiction has certainly not upset the Florentine purists who know Dante’s work the best. Indeed, Brown-inspired Dante fever is gripping Florence, and the leader of pack happens to be president of the esteemed Dante Society, Eugenio Giani, who believes a little Dan Brown fairy dust is just what the city needs right now. Brown will be reading from Inferno at a literary festival in Florence on June 6, and Giani plans to thank the American writer personally for reintroducing Dante to a whole new group of readers.

“Dante is the most important figure in the history of this city,” Giani, who is also the head of the Florence City Council, told The Daily Beast on an impromptu tour of the Palazzo Vecchio’s secret passages, which feature in Inferno. “Dan Brown is simply making the introduction to Dante to people who may have never paused to appreciate his genius. It will be up to the readers to form their own opinion about Dante’s real legacy. Either way, people will be talking about him.”

Barely a few hours into the 2013 Biennale, and here’s an image of the facade of the U.S. Pavilion, which this year was given over to New York artist Sarah Sze. In recent Biennales, a number of the artists repping the U.S. have had a strong political dimension, and at first sight it looked as though Sze was breaking that mold. Her fantastical accumulations of detritus and throwaway goods can seem to pack more whimsy than wallop. But as her trademark agglomerations mounted to the building’s pediment, half concealing the Italian words that identify its owners, there was a sense that we were looking at a possible future for our nation, where all the stuff we make and own leaves no room for a true civic life. Her work may also speak to the larger condition of art in our times … but I’ll tackle THAT in a few days, in my full-scale Biennale review for Newsweek. 

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War is not child’s play—except when it is. In a new exhibition called War Games, which opened May 25 at the V&A Museum of Childhood in London, curators Ieuan Hopkins and Sarah Wood bring together more than 100 objects in an effort to explore how the worlds of warfare and childhood have intersected and influenced each other since 1800.

Today, many of these objects—Get Rid of the Huns, a British puzzle from 1914; a deck of cards hand-drawn by Buchenwald prisoners; a doll’s house designed to teach soldiers about house-to-house combat—can seem “quite horrific,” admits Hopkins. “But once children get a hold of them, the imagination takes hold, and you have Boer War soldiers fighting space aliens with World War II bombers flying overhead. War surrounds us. It surrounds children. Toys—and play in general—are just ways for them to make sense of the world.”

Below, Hopkins and Wood give Newsweek a tour of a dozen key objects from the exhibition.