During my time in Europe, I have visited an abundant amount of museum, and I have gone to some of the largest exhibitions in the globe: the 57th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, and Skulptur Projekt Munster. My ten weeks in Europe contained a lot of art seeing and touring around.
Collectively, the art that I’ve seen speaks to an amorphous blob of global history and movement. The Guggenheim Museum in Venice contains lots of artists and works from all over Europe, that span great time periods. It contains works by Pablo Picasso, Italian futurists, Magritte, Mondrian, and much more. Museums with such varied collections was actually pretty common. The Kunsthalle Dusseldorf contains works from several movements, such as Pop art, and it was all contained in a single museum. What does it mean to go and see exhibitions like the Guggenheim and Kunsthalle?
Well it seems clearer and clearer that I am engaging not exactly with the history and culture of a specific country, which I thought would be more representative of art tourism than it has been, but with the amorphous blob of a European history (sometimes global history). I can’t recall a single time when an exhibition contained country specific art, except for sometimes at the pavilions in the Venice Biennale (but then again, that mode of exhibition seems outdated, the artists are often international, and are often influenced by international art movements). I thought it was interesting that art tourism meant to engage with a collective history that people that were from from all over geographically. It is an interesting way of engaging with history. The Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf contained lots of art commenting on Nazism, and world war two, which was for sure an unusual way to look back at the subject. This kind of art tourism exposed me to how art responded to such events, which I imagine are representative of a greater societal response. The works made fun of Hitler, and often tried to make comedic commentary, which I imagine is an important way of dealing with the horrific events.
Being an art tourist also meant engaging with a broader, more global history. The Uffizi Accademia in Florence revealed a lot about religious history. Many landscapes of hell depicted what people would fear about hell, and made the idea of religion come alive for me. The countless depictions of angels and religious events, such as the annunciation, created a narrative that made sense for me. For me, being an art tourist meant engaging with this side of society and history, which I had not really done before. Giotto’s Fresco, or St. Anthony’s dome, or the Florence’s Duomo or St. Peter’s Basilica made religion vivid and powerful. It was easy to feel overwhelmed in a kind of humble manner appreciative manner. Being an art tourist in this kind of sense, gave meaning and context to lots of buzz artist names that I’ve heard in the past, and opened a world of meaning for art (for me).
In terms of the main exhibitions of contemporary art, the meaning of being an art tourist varied for me. At the Venice Biennale, it often involved a mixture of disappointment and awe. Viva Arte Viva, to me, often felt like art consumption for the sake of art consumption. I have to admit there were moments where works made me question why I traveled all the way to Europe to see this. One such work was a slow video of someone grinding the side of a computer laptop. I understood that you could probably give that work meaning by trying to interpret it, but I often had a really hard time understanding the point of the video, or trying to interpret the work.
Other times, I felt infinitely grateful that I was being exposed to the art, such as most of my time in Documenta 14. Perhaps this is because activism, and thinking about social issues is something I want to do, but I often found such powerful meaning in so many works. Art tourism for me meant engaging with a wide range of works.
Curators, critics, and art tourists often herald these exhibitions as the pinnacle of contemporary art. I’ve heard various times that if you are an artist in one of these exhibitions, then you’ll have no trouble finding a job ever again. What does it mean that the pinnacle occurs almost exclusively within europe, each exhibition within a two hour flight from each other?
As I ventured around exhibitions, it didn’t take me long to notice that there were hardly any colored people walking around as I was, looking at art. The contrast was most strikingly when I was sitting in the eating station outside the Italian pavilion (at the Venice Pavilion). There were swarms of people around me. Lots of people taking selfies in front of the large white sign that read “Italia,” lots of people eating in the seats next to me, and lots of people walking out of the Italian pavilion. The scene was almost exclusively white. The single colored person I saw was a few feet away from me, wearing a blue shirt that had a name tag. He was taking out the trash from a bin, getting ready to replace the bin with a fresh new bag.
The sight got me thinking about who exactly comes to these kinds of major exhibitions that are supposed to be the height of contemporary art. I can only speak from experience, but I’ve surely have not seen many colored folk around here. Although the fact that I’ve hardly seen colored folk is simply observational and is devoid of concrete statistical/numerical meaning, I do think the observation speaks to the kind of exclusivity and elitism that exists in the art world. The Venice Biennale in particular occurs in Venice. That alone makes it more exclusive for people outside of Italy. The place can be so expensive for people traveling out of the country. So there for sure seems to be some kind of economic elitism. I’m not exactly how that is related to my observation, but I suppose that will be explored in a different blog post!