Jerry Saltz Has Few Good Things to Say About the Venice Biennale

By Steve Delahoyde on June 16, 2009 11:01 AM

After all the hubbub surrounding the Venice Biennale has subsided and the celebrities all gone back to their celebrity caves, we always enjoy checking in with New York‘s Jerry Saltz, he of the tell-it-like-it-is variety. And tell it he does, with very few positive things to say about the whole fair, handing out a slew of disappointed complaints from start to finish. He did enjoy Bruce Nauman‘s winning pavilion, as well as that of the British, but for the rest of it, he spends most of his time finding the Biennale one huge downer. He even dedicates a particularly lengthy section to hand out his “Worst in Show” awards, which was a tie between Australia, Japan, and France. If you’re a fan of funny negative criticism, here’s the best:

France’s Claude Leveque, who built a cruciform of four intersecting hallways painted with gold sparkle, edges those two out for sheer mindlessness. At the end of each of his hallways are prison bars and a black flag being blown by a fan. A text plaintively asks, “Are the black flags quivering in the distance the rising image of a radical hope of a possible other world?” No, they’re flags of surrender — the pavilion wants to kill itself for housing such bad art. I have four words for Leveque: Get a job, dude.

On a more positive note, but still one with negatives, to help keep our theme going here, make sure you don’t miss the video of artist Mike Bouchet‘s pre-fab house piece, which he needed to float down Venice’s canals to reach the Biennale, but which sank along the way. Fortunately, Bouchet wasn’t too upset, seeing it as perhaps an even better piece of symbolism for the American housing market than he’d originally intended.