Re: <nettime> The 2026 Venice Biennale Implodes: Diplomatic Collapse, Historic Strike, and the Privatisation of Art

[Technologies To The People via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Brian,

How long has it been! Thank you. Coming from you, this means a lot.

I think your formulation is exactly right: the problem is not that the
artworks disappear because they are irrelevant, but that the symbolic order
that normally frames them has fractured so violently that the frame itself
becomes the object of attention. The work is still there, but it is no
longer possible to look at it as if the conditions of its appearance were
secondary.

That is what I was trying to register: a moment in which the Biennale does
not simply host contradictions, but becomes the visible surface of a
collapsing order. The national pavilion, the prize, the curator, the
sponsor, the strike, the police line, the absent country, the closed door —
all of these become part of the same field. The exhibition is no longer
only an exhibition — it never was, of course, but now even that fiction has
become impossible to maintain. It is a diagram of power under stress.

And yes, Grace Lee Boggs’s question is the right one: what time is it on
the clock of the world? In Venice, the answer seems brutally clear. It is
not the time of liberal cultural confidence anymore. It is the time in
which that confidence is losing its capacity to organise meaning,
legitimacy and visibility.

So perhaps the reason one does not “see the art” in the usual way is not
because art has failed, but because the historical clock is suddenly louder
than the museum clock.

Thank you again for reading it with such precision.

El mié, 15 jul 2026 a las 5:27, Brian Holmes (<bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>)
escribió:

> Damn, I mostly skip stuff about the art world these days. So I missed this
> piece which has amazing energy. Kudos to the author(s).
>
> I reckon people know enough about aesthetics to understand that even when
> it's a case of parody, transgression or intransigent refusal, an artwork
> ends up playing within/against the limits of a given symbolic order. Except
> when that symbolic order collapses into chaos. In that case we could say
> the art is de-framed, it loses everything that would allow us to focus on
> it as a singular object. The result, as this extraordinary piece of art
> criticism shows, is that one does not see individual artworks at all. One
> sees only chaos pregnant with violence.
>
> The symbolic field of liberal world order effectively collapsed during the
> first half of the 2020s. This is maybe the first time I've read art
> criticism relevant to the famous question by Grace Lee Boggs: "What time is
> it on the clock of the world?"
>
> Don't go to Venice to see the art. Go there to see liberal hegemony
> imploding in your time.
>
> On Wed, May 13, 2026 at 9:17 AM Technologies To The People via nettime-l <
> nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
>
>> The 61st Venice Art Biennale has just opened its doors, and it is already
>> operating as an institution in a state of emergency. Before the public had
>> even begun to stroll through the Giardini and the Arsenale as usual the
>> 2026 edition was already rife with resignations, boycotts, shuttered
>> pavilions, artists sacked and reinstated, absent countries, European
>> funding under threat, mass protests, and the first strike in its 131-year
>> history. What had long presented itself as the great Olympics of art has
>> become the stage of its own decomposition.
>>
>> The 2026 Venice Biennale demonstrates that the model of national
>> representation born in the nineteenth century has come to an end. It isn't
>> broken: it is functioning exactly as it was designed, but in a world that
>> no longer tolerates the fiction. What is collapsing is not a difficult
>> edition of the biennial. It is the model itself: the old diplomatic
>> architecture of national pavilions, the fiction of institutional
>> neutrality, the idea that art can operate as a zone of truce while the
>> very
>> states that finance, name and represent it wage wars, carry out ethnic
>> cleansing, censor at home and run cultural propaganda campiagns The
>> Biennale does not reflect a world in crisis. It administers it and puts it
>> on display as a symptom.
>>
>> The central exhibition, *In Minor Keys*, arrives marked by an absence that
>> runs through the entire reading of the show. Its artistic director, Koyo
>> Kouoh, died in May 2025. Her team has brought to completion a posthumous
>> vision oriented towards listening, healing, physical and spiritual rest,
>> low frequencies, oases of care. A Biennale that avoids overtly political
>> art and seeks other forms of symbolic repair. On the threshold of the
>> Arsenale, the curatorial team inscribes *If I Must Die*, the poem by
>> Refaat
>> Alareer, the Palestinian writer killed in Gaza in 2023. The gesture set an
>> ethical frame before the exhibition had even begun. But the institutional
>> apparatus that surrounds that threshold swallows it.
>>
>> The Biennale calls for silence while everything around it is screaming. It
>> speaks of pause while Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan and the
>> far-right
>> international run through every conversation in the corridors. It proposes
>> minor keys at a moment of deafening historical noise. The question is not
>> whether rest is necessary. It is. The question is who gets to rest, under
>> what conditions, inside which institution, and at whose expense. In a
>> Biennale sustained by states, elite tourism, luxury brands and precarious
>> cultural labor, the language of care risks becoming an anesthetic, no
>> matter how long Alareer's verse remains on the wall.
>>
>> The controversy broke open when the international jury resigned en masse
>> just days before the opening. Its position is unambiguous: it will not
>> evaluate or award prizes to representatives of states whose leaders have
>> been charged or are being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court
>> for war crimes or crimes against humanity. The reference points directly
>> at
>> Russia and Israel. The institution, unable to hold that conflict,
>> responded
>> by cancelling the traditional prize system and improvising a public-vote
>> award, the so-called Visitor Lion. It then postponed the Golden Lion
>> ceremony to 22 November, the closing day of the Biennale. In other words,
>> it relocated critical judgement to the end of the event, when it would no
>> longer have any political effect. The manoeuvre resolved nothing. It
>> turned
>> an ethical crisis into a mechanism of tourist participation.
>>
>> The artists' response was immediate. Dozens withdrew their works from the
>> competition. The prize was left symbolically empty. When an institution no
>> longer knows how to decide, it delegates to an interface. When critical
>> judgement becomes dangerous, it is replaced by a poll. The problem does
>> not
>> go away. It becomes more visible.
>>
>> From that point on, the Biennale stopped being a map of countries and
>> became a map of conflicts. Russia is not only Russia: it is the war in
>> Ukraine and the normalisation of imperial aggression. And its return to
>> Venice, far from being an administrative formality, was negotiated in
>> secret from June 2025 by commissioner Anastasia Karneeva, daughter of a
>> senior Rostec executive and FSB general. Internal correspondence leaked
>> by *La
>> Repubblica* revealed strategies for getting around European sanctions
>> through pre-recorded performances, along with active logistical support
>> from the Biennale's own management in securing Italian visas for the
>> Russian pavilion's curator. The European Commission has threatened to
>> withdraw two million euros in funding and described the Russian
>> participation as a "propaganda mechanism" incompatible with the sanctions
>> regime. The Biennale claims it is the UN of art, open to any state
>> recognized by Italy. The documents suggest something else: a parallel,
>> anticipatory, discreet diplomacy. Israel is not only Israel: it is Gaza,
>> the accusation of genocide, the Western diplomatic shield, and the dispute
>> over the limits of cultural boycott; it becomes the epicenter of the
>> mobilizations against *artwashing*. Iran is not only an absence: it
>> withdraws quietly, leaving a gap that signals the impossibility of
>> separating culture from the military escalation in the Middle East.
>> Lebanon
>> is not only a place of origin: it is a zone of suspicion projected onto
>> artists' bodies and biographies, as shown by the case of Khaled Sabsabi,
>> selected to represent Australia, dismissed and later reinstated after a
>> controversy over earlier works featuring images of Hezbollah. The work
>> stops being read as work and starts operating as a file.
>>
>> The United States did not escape the discomfort either, but its case has
>> its own texture. The National Endowment for the Arts has seen its funding
>> cut under the new Trump administration. The University of South Florida,
>> originally tasked with coordinating the country's representation,
>> collapsed
>> bureaucratically. The handover went to an opaque body, the American Arts
>> Conservancy, headed by a businesswoman from the pet food sector. The
>> selected artist, Alma Allen, is exhibiting under conditions that have less
>> to do with a national pavilion than with a privatized emergency
>> commission.
>> Beyond the individual case, the detail sketches an architecture: a
>> far-right cultural offensive that no longer limits itself to attacking
>> museums from the outside but hollows institutions out from within and
>> repopulates them with figures from the corporate field. Culture is another
>> front in the identity war. Trumpism understands the value of these spaces
>> very well. It does not want to abandon them. It wants to occupy them. It
>> wants to discipline institutions, turn artistic freedom into propaganda
>> for
>> national values, and reinstate an authoritarian idea of cultural prestige.
>> What we are watching in Venice is the international rehearsal of that
>> operation.
>>
>> The protest did not emerge spontaneously or in disarray. It had logistics,
>> political memory, infrastructure. The organizing work of ANGA, Sale Docks,
>> Morion, Biennalocene and Taring Padi proved decisive in turning unease
>> into
>> coordinated action. ANGA denounced *artwashing* and demanded the exclusion
>> of the Israeli pavilion. Sale Docks and Morion brought an accumulated
>> Venetian experience of self-management, cultural trade unionism, political
>> occupation and territorial organizing. Biennalocene introduced the
>> ecological concerns and the critique of the event's own extractive model.
>> Taring Padi added a genealogy of militant graphic work, collective art and
>> international solidarity. Thanks to this network, the protest was not
>> reduced to gesture. It became a viable structure.
>>
>> The 8 May strike marked a turning point. It was not a protest against a
>> single pavilion. It was a challenge to the Biennale's entire
>> infrastructure. Pavilions were shut down, openings were delayed,
>> performances were suspended, installations were intervened in. Palestinian
>> flags appeared, posters, pickets, bodies blocked the normal stroll through
>> the event. A substantial share of the national pavilions was affected. For
>> the first time in 131 years, the Biennale faced a strike on this scale.
>>
>> And then something decisive happened. The strike shifted the gaze. It was
>> no longer only about the artist as authorial figure or the curator as
>> intellectual mediator. The workers who hold the machinery up came into
>> view: mediators, installers, security staff, technicians, assistants,
>> gallery attendants, translators, producers, cleaners, transporters. The
>> great global exhibition revealed itself for what it always was and is
>> almost never named: a fragile, precarious, outsourced labor
>> infrastructure.
>> The glamour of the opening week rests on a material base that normally
>> remains invisible. The strike made it visible.
>>
>> While the state model sinks into its own contradictions, another power
>> moves forward with considerably greater stability. Private capital does
>> not
>> wait. And it deserves to be named precisely, because confusion serves the
>> apparatus itself. When national pavilions close due to pickets or
>> boycotts,
>> the corporate foundations do not suffer. They program. While the state
>> loses legitimacy, they gain ground, budget and agenda. The public crisis
>> is
>> their private opportunity.
>>
>> The Fondation Pinault now operates as a power parallel to the Biennale:
>> two
>> permanent venues in Venice, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana,
>> year-round programming, a budget that doubles that of many pavilions, and
>> a
>> curatorial line that sets international agenda without going through any
>> public decision. Bulgari has negotiated its appointment as Exclusive
>> Partner of the International Art Exhibition into the next decade, locking
>> in the rights for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 editions. This is not
>> sponsorship: it is institutional integration. Corporate capital becomes
>> inscribed in the Biennale's machinery, funding restorations, prizes and
>> events that embed themselves in the official calendar until they become
>> indistinguishable from the program itself. Prada produces, through its
>> Fondazione, a sophisticated curatorial discourse that quickly metabolizes
>> the critical languages of the moment, from ecology to decolonization.
>> Patrizia Sandretto has gone one step further: in 2026 she inaugurated her
>> third permanent site by buying and rehabilitating an entire island in the
>> northern lagoon. This is no longer about renting palaces. It is about
>> privatizing ecosystem. And all of it under the language of the climate
>> emergency, which private capital uses to rewrite the cultural geography of
>> the city. TBA21 does something equivalent on the symbolic plane: through
>> Ocean Space, in the church of San Lorenzo, it is presenting a project this
>> year on the repatriation and restitution of objects looted from Indigenous
>> communities. It thereby captures, in philanthropic key, one of the debates
>> currently fracturing Europe's state museums, and hands it back framed as a
>> benevolent initiative of corporate capital. They are not patrons. They are
>> the new cultural sovereigns, with their own diplomacy, institutional
>> access
>> and palaces. And the state, far from containing them, opens the doors
>> wide:
>> the recent concession of a pavilion to Qatar for ninety years in exchange
>> for forty million euros confirms that sovereignty in the lagoon is now
>> traded on a market.
>>
>> The success of this operation lies not in its economic volume, which also
>> counts, but in its tone. Privatization does not arrive in reactionary
>> aesthetics. It arrives with progressive vocabulary, impeccable lighting
>> and
>> sophisticated mediation. That is where its power lies. Where the state
>> appears clumsy, violent, censorious or paralysed, private capital presents
>> itself as flexible, cosmopolitan and sensitive. It does not need to raise
>> a
>> flag. Producing atmosphere is enough. It does not censor: it metabolizes.
>> It turns conflict into programming, criticism into reputation, historical
>> injury into symbolic capital. And it does so, moreover, with the
>> signatures
>> of some of the most prestigious curators in the field, which shields the
>> operation from any suspicion of opportunism.
>>
>> The Biennale is thus split between two forces that no longer admit
>> synthesis. On one side, an artistic, labor and militant base demanding
>> material accountability from institutions, refusing to share a platform
>> with states accused of atrocities, and understanding culture as a real
>> field of conflict. On the other, a corporate machinery that absorbs crises
>> and returns them as high-end aesthetic experience. Between the two, the
>> old
>> cultural diplomacy is crumbling without anyone really defending it.
>>
>> Venice 2026 is not failing because politics has invaded art. It fails
>> because institutional art spent far too long pretending it could
>> administer
>> politics without getting its hands dirty. The national pavilion, the
>> international prize, the luxury patronage, the VIP week, cultural tourism
>> and the rhetoric of neutrality are all part of the same apparatus. This
>> edition did not destroy it. It made it visible.
>>
>> That is why the 61st Biennale will be remembered less for its works than
>> for its interruptions. The jury that walked out. The secret diplomacy with
>> Moscow. The Golden Lion postponed to the last day. Iran disappearing from
>> the map. Israel turned into the epicenter of the boycott. Lebanon read
>> under suspicion. The United States hollowed out and reoccupied by the
>> Trumpist offensive. Qatar buying sovereignty for ninety years. The artists
>> who withdrew their names. The workers who stopped work. The collectives
>> that organized. The flags that broke into the white cube.
>>
>> The Biennale is not over. It has barely begun. But something essential has
>> already been laid bare. The institution can no longer claim legitimacy on
>> the basis of a political and legal design from the past. Neutrality has
>> run
>> its course as an alibi. What we will see in the coming weeks is not a
>> debate about contemporary art. It is the dispute over who defines what
>> global culture is: the organized pressure of those who interrupt the
>> machinery, or the capacity of capital to absorb everything without
>> breaking
>> a sweat.
>>
>> Meanwhile, Alareer's poem remains on the threshold of the Arsenale, a
>> reminder that minor keys are no longer enough.
>>
>> In Venice, that conflict is no longer outside the exhibition. It is the
>> exhibition.
>> --
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