“the imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.”

-Umberto Eco, The Fortresses of Solitude

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Prada Foundation’s most recent exhibition, entitled The ship is sinking. The captain lied. It’s not the focus of this blog post, but in short, it’s an investigation into the status of postmodern society as a simulacrum, staged through photography, video, and set-design type installation. The overall effect is overwhelmingly disorienting; to reemerge into the sunlight after two and a half hours inside was difficult. It got me thinking about its specific placement in the city of Venice, and how apt that seemed.

Venice hasn’t really sat right with me. I feel remiss that I’m not able to blend in or have something that feels like a genuine experience, and that two-thirds of the people in the city at any given time are tourists. After visiting the Prada Foundation, more specifically, I got to thinking about Venice as a simulacrum—an “absolute fake”, as Eco puts it. What I mean to say is that, Venice, as it stands today, is a copy of a Venice that no longer exists. To elaborate, I want to first explain what I mean by a simulacrum and “the hyperreal”–a term coined by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in the early 80s to denote a copy that becomes truth in its own right. More specifically, Baudrillard believes that there is a four-step progression into hyperreality: 1) there is a reflection of the real; 2) there is a perversion of reality; 3) there is a copy that poses as reality itself, and 4) there is a simulacrum, which has no commonalities at all with reality, but is still taken and experienced as a reality. This final step is the hyperreal.

Venice, I think, is a perfect example of the hyperreal. Venice has been a tourist destination for centuries, culminating in now an estimated total of 60,000 tourists a day and 30 million per year. The amount of tourists has become not just an annoyance, but an environmental hazard: UNESCO was considering adding it to the list of “in-danger” world heritage sites. There has been a local effort to limit the number of cruise ships arriving in the city, and the local government was considering a ban on rolling suitcases in the street. So why are there so many tourists? And what does this have to do with hyperreality? I’m of the persuasion that, over centuries of tourism, Venice has evolved from something real into a copy of a real thing that no longer exists. Take the gondolas, for example. Tourists come to the city demanding the “real” Venice, which, as is demonstrated in Renaissance paintings, at one time included the use of gondolas and gondoliers as transportation. Now, however, Venetians have little speedboats to putt around in, rendering the gondolas obsolete. Rather than the gondolas disappearing, however, I believe they have been subjected to the move into hyperreality. They now exist to give tourists the experience of “real” Venice, when, in actuality, they “bear no relation to reality whatsoever”, in the words of Baudrillard. Gone are their role as transportation; they now exist solely as sightseeing apparatuses for exorbitant prices (and even more if you want your gondolier to sing to you). Venice is now a copy of a Venice that no longer exists; it is the definition of a simulacrum.

Gondoliers, themselves, represent an aspect of a further perversion of the real known as “Disneyfication”, a term coined by Peter Fallon, which delineates a society’s move to resemble Walt Disney’s theme parks. Aspects of this shift are evidenced by performative labor, which is perfectly encapsulated by the gondoliers (no longer are they just boat conductors—no, they all wear the striped shirts and straw hats and sing opera!) and merchandising, which is readily apparent on every street corner with the hundreds of vendors selling Venice memorabilia (all adorned with the “symbols of Venice”: gondola prow-heads, masks, and other things that have no bearing on the actual lived reality of Venice and that exist solely as merchandising tools). Venice, however, is in some ways more hyperreal than Disneyland: it is consumed as real and poses as real, whereas Disneyland does not pose as anything other than what it is—imaginary.

Finally, I want to call attention to the fact that the hyperreal, copy-without-an-original Venice has copies elsewhere in the world, including in Universal Studios and Las Vegas. I would propose that, since these “Disney” copies are known to be copies and consumed as such (like Disneyland), whereas the Venice in Italy is consumed as real, the copies are in fact more real than the supposed “original”.

I am aware that I have grossly simplified Venice as a whole for the sake of my argument. I recognize that I have and others have had real experiences in Venice, especially having spent four weeks there, and by living off the main island. However, for the majority of tourists loading off of cruise ships to ogle at St. Marco’s square and tromp over the Rialto bridge, there is no real experience in sight: in their case, it would have been more authentic just to go to Disneyland.