Since attending Berlin Art Gallery weekend with Michelle, I've become really convinced that there is a space for art and design here on All the Pretty Birds. Not being remotely well versed on the subject, I've asked my friend Sara Schifano to become my Arts contributor. For her first post, she weighs in on the presence of fashion at the Venice Biennale.
The Venice Biennale: is art the new social currency?
While in Venice for the Art Biennale, Tamu invited me to write about art for All the Pretty Birds. I accepted immediately for two reasons: first it’s impossible to say no to her smile, second I thought it would be a great challenge to try and bring some of my world into hers.
It turned out this year’s Venice Biennale was – to use a fashion term – the perfect mix and match between art and fashion (and many other things). The exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni, titled the Encyclopedic Palace, is rich, highly intellectual but at the same time democratic, bringing a lot of self-taught artists, philosophers and thinkers into the spaces usually destined exclusively to art.
After a few decades of being closed within its ivory tower, art is opening up to the world again, and the world is responding to this interest. This is why at this year’s Biennale you’ll see tantric paintings from unknown authors, the Red Book by psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, a reconstruction of a Christian Vietnamese church by up and coming artist Danh Vo, paper dolls and photographs from the personal collection of Cindy Sherman, a comic version of the Book of Genesis by cartoonist Robert Crumb and a reinterpretation of various television formats in the installation of Ryan Trecartin.
What struck me the most this year weren’t the artworks to be honest, but rather a shift in the crowd during the opening days. I realized while walking through the spaces of the Arsenale, that Tamu kept bumping into people from the fashion industry. It’s true, fashion was always intertwined with art on a certain level but today, in the age of social media ubiquity, everyone felt the need to descend to Venice and pay a visit to one of the most renowned exhibitions in the world. After all, as I learned, art is the new social currency. And so I figured it would be fascinating to explore the way the art world sees itself and the way the fashion world sees it.
So far, I can tell “fashion people” are more prone to color, people, and the performative, or to use another word, the “living” side of art. While “art people” are prone to, well, pretty much anything. Be it beautiful or disturbing, ironic or disgusting, superficial or political. Maybe this is the difference then, fashion is about the culmination of a show or an image, while art is more about a process and an open question? And what will happen now if art really became THE social currency? I hope we can discover it together here!
Images from top:
1- The Dry Salvages by Elisabetta Benassi
2-7 Varios works at the Italian pavilion.
8- A work by Channa Horwitz
10- A work by Dieter Roth
11- A work from Cindy Sherman's special curation.
13- Part of a work by Dan Voh
14- A photograph by J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere
15- An installation by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar
Sara is an Art and Design contributor at Grazia.it. She also contributes to Monocle 24 Radio, Cura Art Magazine, DDN Design Diffusion Edizioni, and was a Managing Editor at Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore. Please stay tune for more articles by Sara.
Photos by me.
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