My Biennale Favorites

The work in the Giardini, where many of the national pavilions are located, was scattershot. The most satisfactory to me were the works of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Each got offered a pavilion—Elmgreen the Danish pavilion and Dragset the Nordic. Each accepted and working together they constructed two “collector’s houses.”

A "FOR SALE" sign hangs outside the Nordic pavilion and a real-estate agent takes visitors on house tours. But within dark deeds have occurred. "I’LL NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN" is scrawled on a mirror. The bottom the staircase is shattered. A dining table is bisected. Handlettered cardboard appeals for help—"PLEASE HAVE A HEART. THANK YOU"—are framed on one wall with the city or origin indicated. Opposite are two faux pinstripe Stellas.

But still the real-estate agent—who will, in fact, be either Helen Statman or Trevor Stuart of the London-based Performance group, Cocoloco—keeps up the patter. Artists are generally skittish about humour. Not Elmgreen and Dragset.

Prizes were handed out late Saturday afternoom in a white tent in the Giardini. Two plumed carabineri stood guard as Yoko Ono received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and gave a speech ending “Peace.” John Baldesssari received a second trophy and made an even shorter one, thanking Giotto, Goya, Matisse, Duchamp, and Sol LeWitt.

The Bruce Nauman show won America the national prize, a victory which was greeted with whistles, whoops, and bravos “Would this have happened if Bush were president?” an Italian journalist asked. He didn’t seem to think his question needed an answer.

Elmgreen and Dragset got an honorable mention.

Afterward, Michael Elmgreen pulled his award, a tiny gold lion, out of its mini-box.

“We got the bambino award,” he said, cheerfully.

Traipsing the Biennale and the numerous collaterals has been at once ho-hum and encouraging. The ho-hum is that it confirmed that the last quarter century has produced a generation of curators who are pastmasters at discovering and showing the work of artists who seem driven by nothing much more than the notion that it’s pretty cool to be an artist so why not find something that hasn’t been done? Which thinking is the mainspring of Salon post-modernism.

The encouraging thing is the flipside of the ho-hum, which is that the art world has become so vast that it is unstoppable, recession or no recession. And here at Venice were such breathtaking, smile-inducing shows as Robert Rauschenberg’s Gluts at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, which remind you what the whole thing is about.

By the way, I had been looking for John Cale. He is representing Wales and he is an old friend. Too much going on, never got a fix on him. On my last day but one I crossed to the Giudecca and ran into him on the quay. Just along from where his piece was too.

Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet.

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Anthony Haden-Guest writes a weekly column on art collecting for the Financial Times. He is the author of several books, including True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World. He lives in New York and London.