“I will not make any more boring art” -John Baldessari.
“I will not make any more boring art” -John Baldessari. Full coverage
NYT
Venice Biennale: Let the Invasion Begin
By Randy Kennedy
VENICE — The 53rd Venice Biennale is not yet officially underway here but signs of it are everywhere, bubbling up out of the canals, blaring from loudspeakers, flapping from the sides of palazzi. Probably the most thematically appropriate — given the shaken state of the art market and the art world as a whole — is the schoolchild’s maxim on a huge sign dangling from a sun-bleached facade near St. Mark’s Square: “I will not make any more boring art.” John Baldessari, whose influence over many of the artists showing this year makes him one of the event’s presiding deities, first made the statement in prints almost 40 years ago. But it is wise, wickedly funny advice at a time when the money tide has ebbed and bad art is much more easily spotted.
Just up the Grand Canal from that sign is another big one advertising installations by Bruce Nauman, the artist who is officially representing the United States in Venice. And in the water somewhere beneath that sign, at least on Tuesday afternoon, there was another exhibition, by artists as yet unknown: a multicolored, frighteningly home-made looking submarine that seemed to have just surfaced in the canal.
Indeed, the art people are in the midst of their biennial invasion of Venice from all parts of the globe. On my water shuttle from the airport, six of the other seven people in the boat were curators or artists or friends of artists or in town to document the doings of artists and curators and friends of artists. To pass the time, a Canadian video producer was regaling two other passengers about the time he was strip searched by police while crossing the border into the United States.
“They at least let me keep my socks on,” he said, “which was nice.”
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