Colin Gleadell reports on the Venice Biennale
There are currently more than 60 contemporary art
biennales held throughout the world in which artists are invited by expert curators to exhibit, but Venice is the most
prestigious.
A distinguishing feature of the biennales is that they are all ostensibly
non-commercial events. This was not always so. During the 1940s and '50s, when
British artists such as Henry Moore and Lynn Chadwick were being promoted to an
international audience, Venice was an openly selling exhibition. But sales
commissions went to the organisers not the artists' dealers, who objected. In
1968, the organisers decided to pursue the ideal of an exhibition untainted by
commerce, and made it a non-selling event.
However, the Venice Biennale's power to affect the market only increased. If
any artist's reputation is to be made, confirmed or revived, Venice is the place
for it to be done. This is because all the important art critics, museum
curators and collectors - the people who call the shots on an artist's career -
go there.
Not surprisingly, the selling element continues, but it does so as a more
covert activity. In the party atmosphere that pervades, dealers practise the art
of the soft sell, watching over their artists' work and wining and dining
potential customers. Big sales are made. In 1991, fashion supremo Miuccia Prada
bought Anish Kapoor's big installation Void Field, shown in the British
pavilion, for what was then the substantial amount of $1 million.
The shows can even affect the auction market. In 2003, Canadian artist
Richard Prince exhibited a series of photographs of cowboys taken from Marlboro
cigarette advertisements to universal acclaim. In November that year, two of
Prince's photographs from the same series tripled and quadrupled estimates at
auction, one setting a record $460,000 for the artist.
At a conference in Venice in 2001, the influential artist and teacher Jon
Thompson bemoaned the loss of a potentially utopian cultural event free from
commercial considerations. "All I hear in every restaurant at every table is
people talking about doing deals," he said.
But, in a booming art market, the trend is only likely to continue. Last week
London's Max Wigram Gallery opened an exhibition of paintings by Mustafa Hulusi,
who has been selected to represent Cyprus this year. "It was scheduled to
coincide with the Biennale," says director Michael Briggs. Hulusi is already in
the notable British collections of Charles Saatchi and Anita Zabludowicz, but
the gallery is hoping the work will attract bigger international collectors. "We
will treat it as a selling platform," says Briggs.
