A Template for Israel-Germany Cooperation

Such cooperation could work on the principle of establishing one or several Internationale Forschungs-"Filiale" that would closely work with their counterpart research institutes in Germany.

Relations between Art Biennials and Experience Society

Among the applications of a research on art biennials could be conclusions drawn with respect to cultural diplomacy since cities are entities that perform their identity on scales ranging from local to global. Another conclusion that can be drawn from the operation of art biennials is their role in the urban culture, economy, society and space, especially in view of Gerhard Schulze's notion of 'arrival' which he uses to describe a necessity of a modernization of the process of modernization that has shaped modern cities that need to redefine their relation to the change that modernity is associated with in terms that recognize the unstraightforwardness of urban development once major goals of modernization of cities are achieved. 

In other words, the global trend of the growth in the number, scale, and scope of art biennials corresponds to the transition to experience society that Schulze theorizes. The orientation of experience society to post-material development foregrounds culture as a factor of social, economic, cultural and political change an adequate response to which on the urban level should become a priority of urban policy-making. The post-material orientation stresses personal encounters over customer relations, historical preservation over architectural uniformity, creative work over mass production, and unique experiences over material possessions. 

Within this framework, art biennials express a more general transformation of economy, culture, society, and politics that under the influence of the intensification of the processes of communication allocate increasing resources to the process of management of the inflation or deflation of their media of exchange, as Richard Munch argues. These transitions not infrequently become thematized, explored, and mapped by contemporary art that as it loses its foundations that a theory of art would supply becomes an experimental field of inquiry into the economic, social, cultural and spatial interrelations that it becomes drawn into. 

Since the challenge of the arrival at the stage where the continuation of the process of modernity is largely unattended to, contemporary art offers rare opportunity of access to experience society.

Review of BB5 in Baux Arts; Larger Reflections; Geography

Definitely, the short six-point pience in the Baux Arts is an unsparing one. Berlin biennial, indeed, competes with the art biennials having far greater Renommee than it does. The art events in Venice, Kassel and Lyons - the last a little surprising choice - pose an insuperable challenge, perhaps, to any up-and-coming art biennial that would want to be mentioned in the same rank of reputation, power, expertise and money, since it is an overall judgment of the reviewer - Emmanuelle Lequeux - that sees the Berlin biennial to pitifully fail to score a success vis-a-vis its more established counterparts. However it is a positive counterpoint speaking in favor of visiting Berlin in these days of the biennial exhibition - that of seeing a different selection of place-sensitive works of art, not to forget the more eastern location of Germany, and especially East Germany historically surrounding the formerly divided city of Berlin - that draws my attention.

More highly internationalized art exhibitions - and here the advantages of the Venice, Kassel, and, possibly Lyons art events come into critical light, or shadow - lose of out sight the relations between space and culture, and more specifically between cities and culture that is of interest to me, since if I am to reconstruct art biennial as an analytical ideal type - as opposed to its historical incarnations - I have to think harder about the place of art exhibitions with relations, vis-a-vis possibly, to the social, political, economic and cultural structures that stretching from scales micro to macro make the former sociologically meaningful.

The remaining question would be what then happens on the events that supposedly loose any connection to their spatial, urban, and cultural contextuality as I have implied earlier vis-a-vis the established and historical art biennials. Should a global shift of power to the east - notice that I take a blog distance to the originally hyperlinked article on the topic - also mean a special prominence of art biennials taking place, say, in Shanghai, Gwangju, Singapore or Sydney?

Media Coverage of 5th Berlin Biennale

Bits and pieces. This page of the official site for the 5th Berlin Biennale contains a series of press excerpts documenting the media response to the event taking place in April-June, 2008.