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.