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?