Venice Biennale
Architecture has hit a nadir at the Venice Biennale
Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty,…
A satire on the modern art market: The Violet Hour, by James Cahill, reviewed
A world-renowned painter becomes the ghost of his former self, betraying his instincts to embrace sterile abstraction – and even outsourcing his work to ‘a fabricator in Zurich’
The tragic fate of Ukraine’s avant-garde
In a recent interview Oleksandr Syrskyi, the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, said that he spends his time off…
The latest Venice Biennale is ideologically and aesthetically bankrupt
Last week’s opening of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale marks a watershed for the art world. In much…
Doors of perception
Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of…
If opera survives, it’ll be thanks to artists and curators, not opera houses
It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all…
The great pretenders
Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries
More Marx than Dante
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
Curators
As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal…
Art from another planet
‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966…
Lost in translation
At the Venice Biennale last year, Jeremy Deller presented English Magic in the British Pavilion. It was an aggressive look…
