2007 Ad

There have been three occasions in the history of the Venice Biennale when the nature of American cultural influence has emerged as a central issue. The first was in 1964, when Robert Rauschenberg took home the Biennale prize for painting, a recognition tantamount to Europe's official concession that the art world's center of gravity had shifted from Paris to New York. The second was 1990, when Jenny Holzer's sumptuous installation of marble inlay and LED signs in the U.S. pavilion prompted widespread grousing that the Americans, who bagged that year's Golden Lion for the best national presentation, had bought their way to Biennale hegemony. The third occasion is now, with the 52nd edition of the venerable institution having been entrusted to its first American-born visual-arts director, Robert Storr.

To be sure, just one of the Biennale's three components bears the director's imprint outright: the international group show, which is divided between the "Italy" pavilion in the municipal garden, or Giardini, and the cavernous former naval facility called the Arsenale, which lies between the Giardini at the city's eastern end and Piazza San Marco. (The Italy pavilion is not to be confused with Italy's own national presentation, called the "Italian" pavilion, which appears in the Arsenale.) The Biennale's defining feature remains the tradition of showcasing national presentations. This year, the number of countries sponsoring exhibitions reached a record 76, with the 31 original pavilions erected in the Giardini representing a minority stake for the first time. Four more have been accommodated within the Arsehale, while the rest are distributed in palazzi, warehouses and other structures throughout the city. The Biennale's third component is the menu of affiliated or "collateral" exhibitions, which this year likewise posts a new high of 34 shows, large and small.

Mirroring that expansion, however, the visual-arts director's exhibition has grown in size and notoriety over the last 15 years, becoming an international curatorial plum and assuming a cardinal role in determining the tone of the Biennale overall. And this year? Storr's show has been judiciously selected and impeccably installed. It is star-studded but not overly trendy, being inclined to favor senior and A-list artists. It boasts a sizable field of painters, in contrast to the rest of the Biennale. The international exhibition is conscientious, considered, and--with a few ravishing exceptions--resolutely unremarkable.

If the Rauschenberg coup represented the ascendance of America's irreverent and inclusive '60s spirit, and the Holzer brouhaha reflected widespread resentment of the overweening financial clout of the United States in the early '90s, then Storr--with his show's uniform polish and abundance of big shots, its avoidance of the unscripted and potentially messy--stands open to the objection that he has imposed the cold and businesslike standards of an American museum onto the once freewheeling culture of the Biennale, with its tolerance of the ephemeral and improvisational. Add to this the observation that more than a third of the artists in his exhibition are American or live for much of the year in New York, the fact that many of the international artists exhibit in its leading galleries, and the matter of Storr's having rubber-stamped a decision to allocate the pavilion of Africa to the private collection of a controversial businessman, and then for good measure throw in the fact that the U.S. pavilion houses a bland, Guggenheim-curated tribute to the long-departed Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and you can readily get a picture of American curatorial leadership as chary of risk-taking and prone to ignoring the big picture while regarding "culture" as the summary of individual acts of serf-expression and patronage.

Before anyone accuses Storr of having unilaterally imposed U.S. values on Venice, it's important to remember that the character, if not the itemized content, of the current Biennale was essentially foretold three years ago. Indeed, Storr has delivered the authoritative and disciplined exhibition mandated in 2004 by Davide Croft, the president of the Biennale's administrative board [see "Front Page," Oct. '04]. In August 2004, when Croft appointed the visual-arts directors for the following year (Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez), he also took the unprecedented step of announcing their successor for 2007. Storr thus became the beneficiary of the longest lead time ever granted to an organizer of the Venice show.

Storr is not only the first American curator to be handed the reins of the Biennale: he is the first in nearly two decades who does not fit the profile of the independent international curator, that intrepid impresario with loose or multiple museum affiliations who ranges far and wide, alone and on teams, ready to discover nascent stars and baptize new trends. By contrast, Storr is a professor (at NYU in 2004 when he was appointed by Croft, currently the dean of Yale's School of Art) and a curator who spent 13 years, the lion's share of his career, at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where exhibitions generally serve to fix the flux of contemporary art in the golden amber of institutional affirmation. Though no stranger to group shows, Storr has tended to direct his efforts toward diligently researched monographic exhibitions rather than toward assembling epoch-defining or prodigy-launching group shows aimed at roiling the waters of public or critical opinion. In 2004, Croft set out to make over the Biennale, to replace the exhausting polemical flamboyance and edge-worshipping excess of Francesco Bonami's 2003 exhibition with a dignified show born of focus, probity and conviction. He found his man in Storr.