Death of Venice

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Eastern promise: Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi's mural stood out at the Venice Biennale

You could see the relief on the faces of the crumpled art aficionados as they boarded the plane from Venice last Monday for the Basel Art Fair. Usually the pilgrimage from the creative curating of the Biennale to the commercial accounting of Art Basel is peppered with tall tales and aesthetic discoveries.

Basel is strategically timed to consolidate the impressions made and deals struck in Venice. This year we could not wait to leave the pavilioned heat and enter the temperate climate of Switzerland and the air-conditioned neutrality of Basel's exhibition halls.

It was not only the most searing heat since 1908, nor humidity pushing 90 per cent, nor 40,000 art professionals who for three days were simply pushing, that made this the most disappointing Biennale for many years. There was a strong sense that the exhibition's format had run its course.

The Venice Biennale has been the most significant art event in the world for more than 100 years. The organisers anticipate some 400,000 visitors over the summer (open to the public until 2 November) and it is seen as a barometer of all that is hot in the art world.

While it seems as if every city has its own international art outing every other year, Venice retains its ascendancy because it is Venice; it even has permanent national pavilions for the event. But that is part of the problem; the boulevards of the Giardini reveal a world order and a colonial history quite different from today.

Art Basel, on the other hand, some 35 years young, is the largest art fair in the world despite being only a week long, and a manifestation that art, however lofty its aspirations, is a billion-dollar business.

Yet, in two days, pacing from booth to booth and not seeing daylight for 10 hours at a time, I saw more work I could carry in my heart than in five days among the irresistible splendours of Venice. It was a disturbing realisation, and I was not alone.

In the Arsenale, where the Biennale's more extreme displays are housed, it was often unclear where one work began and another ended. The rumour was that Cologne-based Carsten Holler's piece for the Utopia Station exhibition - a curatorial new-hippy free-for-all involving collaborative and interactive art works - persuaded other artists not to have labels by their works. The idea was to break down hierarchical structures. It frustrated the heck out of me.

At Basel, by contrast, everything is meant to have a label and a price. There are 1,500 artists represented by 270 galleries. Even the Art Unlimited section - a selection of large-scale installations in its own 12,000-square-metre hall and the fair's sop to a guilty conscience at being so commercially driven - looked elegant and informative compared with Venice. I even watched video, something almost impossible in the Venice sauna.

The work on sale was high quality, but while the mood was buoyant, the deals were taking longer to gel. White Cube's booth was as crowded as ever, with some Hirst resales. An early medicine cabinet from 1991 is now optimistically priced at $700,000.

I had a sneak preview of Damien's new work on transparency. Look forward in the autumn to black fly paintings, kaleidoscopic butterfly paintings and 12 steel cabinets representing the disciples and how they died. At LA's Regen Projects, a Matthew Barney photograph from Cremaster 2 took more than 24 hours - a long time in the Barney market - to sell at $75,000.

What Basel showed, though, is that the market is holding up and painting is gathering momentum. One of the highlights of Venice was Biennale director Francesco Bonami's show, taking a singular, occasionally eccentric, view of the past 30 years of painting, taking in the expressive Rauschenberg and Schnabel towards the cooler configurations of Hume and Hirst. It concludes with the more-fashionable-than-hot-pants Takashi Murakami-best known these days for painting smiley faces on Louis Vuitton bags (mercilessly copied and hawked in the Venice streets).

Murakami's prices have trebled in the past year to near $200,000. Personally I should rather put my lunch money into a large canvas by the West Coast iconic Ed Ruscha, priced at $400,000 - but he is, to my mind, a contemporary legend. Venice worked well for Luc Tuymans, who two years after representing Belgium is now in the $300,000 bracket.

The paintings in Venice shone gloriously in hazy sunlight. I was so overwhelmed by Chris Ofili's reworking of the British pavilion with architect David Adjaye - all light-absorbing mute black with saturated green and red - that I found myself at the end of the exhibit with an uncomfortable feeling of not having seen his paintings at all. I had to go in again to check what I had missed.

Ofili was an inspired choice to represent Britain, but the Welsh and Scots now have devolved pavilions far from the Giardini, across the water on Giudecca and at the Grand Canal respectively, requiring dexterity with map-reading and a day-pass on the Vaporetto.

Many were asking what would happen when the Scot Douglas Gordon - long overdue for Venice - was invited to represent Britain. The word from the Scottish camp is that they will encourage him to take the GB pavilion, and they will continue to fly the St Andrew's flag further up the canal.

The British pavilion is always immaculately conceived and produced by the British Council, but other countries are more transparent with their selection and curatorial input - I look forward to the day when the BC opens up the process to wider debate.

In the Arsenale I enjoyed what was the Biennale's first serious attempt at looking at art from the Middle East, curated by Catherine David. I was thinking that this is where an international exhibition can go some way to reflecting the hopes and anxieties of our time, when a renowned art critic whispered in my ear: "Baghdad - it's the new Hoxton."

But not all countries and regions are created equal in Venice. There's too much to see, so the consumer must prioritise. When Luxembourg, tucked away by Accademia, won the prize for best pavilion, it became the bestknown show in town that no one saw.

For those who missed it, you could pretend to have seen it by describing Su-Mei Tse's work as a lyrical series of rooms, the first a foam-lined anechoic chamber and the last screening a video of a lone cellist playing against the accompaniment of her own echo in the mountains. Another screening shows hundreds of street sweepers gently, rhythmically sweeping away at the sand in the desert, while another features two chairs and a table with a rolled ball of wool on a table, referring to Penelope after her journey.

I didn't get inside the Spanish pavilion - but that was part of the work. The pavilion was boarded up, save for a back entrance, where a guard wouldn't let you pass without a Spanish passport. I explained that I could prove Spanish descent back to 1492, but the guard, the artist and the curator insisted on more up-to-date documentation.

I gather there was little to see inside, save the detritus of previous biennales. And perhaps that is symbolic. Venice produces a blockbuster event that piles up art like landfill sites, and in the lush canalside gardens we can't see the wood for the trees.

 

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