by Jon Lackman | 30 April 2008 | Africa
Artnet News surveys the Artforum debates over the most recent Venice Bienniale, declares a pox on all their houses:
… The dispute has gotten delightfully nasty, if you like that sort of thing, with some of the art-world’s most sophisticated curators acting like so many playground bullies … One thing seems clear from the contretemps, and that is that none of these curators take criticism well … In the end, Storr makes an undeniable point — that none of the three reviews of the 52nd Venice Biennale actually said much of note about the actual art in the show … He might have garnered more sympathy had he simply kept quiet; the same letters page contains a concise and eloquent defense of the 52nd Biennale against Morgan’s “spiteful ad hominem attack” by Irving Sandler … Buried in what amounts to colorful art-world infighting is the only point worthy of real controversy — the questions that plagued Storr’s attempt to “bring the representation of African art into the core areas of the Biennale.” … With luck, the biennale will leave us with more than an ugly lesson about curatorial ego and bad faith. In 1984, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Primitivism” exhibition set off a vigorous exchange in Artforum, and led to a rethinking of the way non-Western art was shown, “[p]erhaps the beginning of multiculturalist theory in the art world,” as Jerry Saltz put it in his recent “New York Canon.” Similarly, the dispute over the African pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale should provoke a more thorough-going investigation of the role played by contemporary art and patronage in the real world, as well as in the ivory tower.
