a slew of really boring criticism but one

Summer is almost over. The Venice Biennial has come and not yet gone. The art season is resuming. And like the fall harvest, art rags are coming off the presses once more containing reviews of Venice, this time, ‘09.

As it does every two years, Art Forum has enlisted contributors to review this latest version of the Grand Damme of biennials. This current slew of sedate and rather boring articles will certainly not engender the venomous, if fun to read from the boonies, exchange between critics of the last V biennial, some of which are art directors and curators with their own agenda, and its director Robert Storr. See original reviews of that biennial in the September 2007 issue and the letters (!) going back and forth between director and critics in the January and February issues of that same year. You’ll need to go to a library; interestingly enough, for a left leaning operation, Art Forum is rather proprietary and yanks their old articles from the net as soon as the month expires. I digress.

The exception to the rule of sedate writings about this year's Venice Biennial seems to be the review by Diedrich Diedrechsen. He actually gives those of us non-visitors who can’t afford to fly to Venice every two years an overview, and what’s more, an over-arching opinion of Making Worlds (a shortened version of the name of this year's extravaganza). In the process, he also evaluates key pieces in order to illustrate his more general points about the exhibit. Ma foi, honest to goodness criticism! Unlike Diedrechsen, most the other reviewers seem to concentrate on describing some of the works without giving us a feel for the whole.

What follows is one of my favorite paragraphs. You can link to some of the other reviews through http://artforum.com/inprint/; however, DD’s is not posted. To read his opinion, one has go to the library once more ...let’s hear it for the physical world of locomotion and of printing presses; maybe keeping us modern is ArtForum’s agenda after all...

Here goes:

Another dominant strategy that art shares with the culture industry is that of pseudoparticipation. This encompasses the so-called prosumer, or professional consumer, and partakes of the permanent animation of audiences on the Internet and in other consumer-culture contexts under the neoliberal regime of unfocused attention. With its remaindered Situationist vocabulary, pseudoparticipation often even considers itself the present-day continuation of radicality. What artists who make this kind of work completely fail to notice is that the apparently permanent collapse of the validity of forms is possibly the most important challenge facing contemporary art—the trick is knowing what doesn’t work anymore because it doesn’t mean the same thing or have the same effect it once did. In “Making Worlds”, the palest vestige of the pseudoparticipatory model is surely Miranda July’s outdoor installation Eleven Heavy Things 2009—nightmare of smirking cuteness; purgatory of putative lightness; apotheosis of harmlessness—which invites the audience to pose and to be photographed on top of pedestals with funny inscriptions. As someone near me astutely said, "Erwin Wurm for the even poorer.” But this same work was extolled by the press, evidentially because it successfully liquidates any difference between an artistic demand and the general program of entertainment. (ArtForum, September 2009, p.243)

God I love this guy!