America Wins Venice Biennale

If the Venice Biennale is the Olympics of the art world, then the United States has just taken home the gold. Bruce Nauman, one of the most influential living American artists, secured a Golden Lion for the States on Saturday for his work Topological Gardens. Nauman’s mixed-media work represents developments from his four-decade career, which the judges described as “iconic embodiments of human pain and fragility to pithy jabs at our frailties.” Germany’s Tobias Rehberger won the Golden Lion for Best Artist, a special mention went to Dutch curators Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, and John Baldessari and Yoko Ono were awarded Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement.