DEATH IN VENICE

At the Biennale, the past dignifies the weird, desperate present.

- JACKSON ARN

Physical fatigue is always a factor in criticism, but at the Venice Biennale, the world's most prestigious recurring art exhibition, it picks up a few seats on the private jury of taste. The event, showcasing hundreds of artists and patronized by hundreds of thousands of people, spans two main locations: the lush parkland of the Giardini, created by Napoleon, and the cluster of retired shipyards and armories known as the Arsenale. Each day of press previews, my black sneakers gained a layer of whitish dust, as though mummified by travel, and my eyes burned with a thousand sightings of the same pink tote bag on everybody's arm. (By the time I left, it seemed as Venetian as a Bellini.) Gravity tugs harder than usual here. No dosage of caffeine is enough. Successful art works sense their audience's aches and respond with exquisite tact.

The limitations of the human body may well be the Biennale's true subject, but at this installment, the sixtieth since 1895, the explicit theme is otherness. The show's title is "Foreigners Everywhere," which at its least trivial signals an emphasis on the creations of the marginalized. In the eighty-seven national pavilions that make up half of the event, many of the featured artists are Indigenous; at the Central Exhibition, which constitutes the other half, a good chunk hail from the Global South and a majority are deceased, the past being the biggest foreign country of all. You might want to complain about the preponderance of death in a show that is implicitly about the health of contemporary art. But any curatorial choice that gives us fewer immersive rooms and preening enfants terribles doesn't seem so bad to me.