Jackie Wullschlager surveys the landscape at Venice and declares the winners.

Venice fixes the world’s gaze because it embodies global trends: this year, how fast distinctions are collapsing between museum and gallery, public and commercial exhibitions, and the roles of dealer, curator and collector. So it is a lovely twist in this marketplace delirium that the stillest, most thoughtful exhibition takes place at a new private museum launched by a fashion house: the Prada Foundation’s Ca’ Corner della Regina, an imposing Grand Canal palazzo with a façade of Istrian stone, frescoes lining a stunning piano nobile and untreated earth floors and open brickwork that set off modern art perfectly – especially the 1950s-60s Italian works at the intellectual core of Miuccia Prada’s collection.Continue Reading

David Velasco has some tart words for what’s become of the Venice Biennale:

It’s a town of hyperbole and hubris, the sort of place where you can park your 377-foot megayacht right against the Sestiere Castello and set up a security fence blocking off half the street, detouring the yachtless hoi polloi who have to walk to the Biennale. A place where one might spot guardian snipers in buoys floating in the shallow waters surrounding such yachts. The sort of place from which, just for fun, a prominent collector may fly out several dozen “friends” for a one-night rendezvous at El Bulli. A place whereCourtney Love might appear at a party like an apparition, breeze through three tiers of velvet ropes, have a conversation with Michael Stipe and Jay Jopling, and then walk, barefoot, through the broken glass back to her hotel room. “It used to be you’d just go to the Giardini, go to your dinner, go to your afterparty, and then go home,” curator Christian Rattemeyer sighed at that particular party. Did the billionaires ship Miami to Venice?

Everything is Illuminated (Scene & Herd/ArtForum)

Olav Velthius has a wonderful piece in The Art Newspaper dissecting the relationship between the Venice Biennale and sales of Contemporary art:

No matter how hard its curators have tried to deny it, the biennale’s impact on the art market is notable: showing in Venice speeds up sales, gets artistic careers going, cranks up price levels and helps artists land a dealer ranked higher in the market’s hierarchy. While business may be conducted in a more circumspect way than at an art fair or in a commercial gallery, and money may not be changing hands in the Arsenale or the Giardini, the market is never asleep. During the biennale’s opening days, dealers such as Berlin- and London-based Sprüth Magers, with five artists in Venice this year, or Zurich-based Eva Presenhuber (seven artists in this year’s edition), will be gauging how deep the interest is in specific works on display, calculating the best way to “place” pieces in the hands of trusted collectors or schmoozing with museum curators. To exploit the Venice Effect, numerous others exhibiting at the biennale, among them, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (Lisson Gallery) and Barbara Visser (Annet Gelink Gallery), will have works for sale at Art Basel, the world’s most important modern and contemporary art fair, which opens its doors only a week later (15-19 June, pp15-18). Their dealers’ credo: “See it in Venice, buy it in Basel.”

The Venice Effect (The Art Newspaper)