Are the arts being drowned out by politics? A few days before the biggest week of the year in Europe’s cultural calendar, that impression may be hard to avoid. The Venice Biennale opens its doors to the public on Saturday, but talk in the run-up to the world’s largest contemporary event has focused little on the works that will go on display inside the national pavilions, and a lot on which pavilions are going to open their doors, or shouldn’t.
The building housing the Russian national representation was open for press previews on Tuesday, pumping out techno, for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s a decision the biennale president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, seems to have made against the wishes of the Italian government that appointed him, and could cost the festival €2m in EU funds for a breach of its ethical standards. Russia has not participated in the past two editions due to its war in Ukraine. Its pavilion’s doors will be closed to the public when the biennale opens fully on 9 May, which a Ukrainian official told the Guardian was a “meaningful step”, after the biennale’s jury resigned en masse in April, in objection to entries from countries whose leaders are subject to international arrest warrants.
The Israeli pavilion will be open, despite protests by 200 participating artists, curators and art workers, who say allowing it amounts to platforming a state engaged in genocide and cultural erasure. The South African pavilion won’t show anything, but the artist who was meant to fill it will display her work inside a church near the Giardini, after the national government blocked it on spurious objections to the work, a tribute to a Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli airstrike. The Iranian pavilion, meanwhile, will remain shut – a decision Tehran announced a day before the press preview without citing a reason, but which is assumed to be related to its war with the US and Israel.
The actual art seems to have become a sideshow. There won’t be a Golden or Silver Lion award for the first time in four decades, because the awarding jury has collectively resigned, after initially saying it wouldn’t give a prize to Israel or Russia because they have been charged with crimes against humanity by the International criminal court.
Polarising art
It’s the same picture at the Eurovision song contest, gearing up for Tuesday and Thursday’s semi-finals and its grand finale in Vienna on 16 May. If you don’t know who the hot favourites are, it’s because all the talk has been around who won’t be in town for the 70th anniversary of the world’s largest live music event: Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Iceland and Slovenia are staying at home, in protest against Israel being allowed to compete.
There’s a counterargument to the idea that political polarisation is making it impossible to talk about artistic merit, however. And it opens on the Côte d’Azur next Wednesday. This year’s Cannes festival has so far been notable for a nigh complete absence of political furore and boycott letters. There’s a notable shortage of Hollywood films in the main competition slots this year, though this looks less like a political statement than a sign of US studios retreating from the critical scrutiny of the festival circuit. A glut of French films set in the Vichy period may yet spark controversy, going by the bad blood over the recent collaboration film Les Rayons et les Ombres, which left-leaning outlets have criticised on the basis that it treats those who willingly served the Nazi killing machine with too much relativity.
The major difference, of course, is that Venice and Eurovision are Olympics or World Cup-style events framed around the idea of artists representing competing nations, whereas Cannes is a global marketplace that happens to be set in southern France. Representing Israel in Venice is Bucharest-born Belu-Simion Fainaru, who has previously represented Romania at the biennale. His installation Rose of Nothingness features a water dripper used to irrigate fields, and has been criticised for celebrating the idea that Israel “made the desert bloom” while denying the reality of access to water being used as a weapon of coercion against Palestine. Fainaru insists he is in Venice as a free artist and not as a representative of the Israeli government, but given the funding structures behind the national pavilions, that distinction is not so clear.
Perhaps the issue isn’t the arts becoming more politicised, but ever more globalised, rendering the prism of national identity increasingly futile. That realisation seems to be behind recently announced changes to the Oscars nomination rules, where the award for best international feature will now be credited to the director, rather than to the country of origin.
At this year’s Cannes, the most highly anticipated new works will be by Iranian film-maker Asghar Farhadi (filmed in Paris with a French cast); exiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (a co-production between France, Latvia and Germany); Paweł Pawlikowski (filmed in Poland with a German cast); and Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu (set and filmed in Norway).
No one likes melting-point art, and there’s still something comforting and reassuring about artists who live up to national stereotypes. That’s testified by the viral success of Italo disco revivalists Mind Enterprises, interviewed in the Guardian this week. The Italian disco duo knock back Campari cocktails on stage and sport retro Sergio Tacchini shorts – but, of course, they reside in Barcelona. Because these days, nationhood rarely captures the reality of how creatives live and work.
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