Art vs. Non-Art in Venice: Let’s Play
The 58th Venice Biennale is full of treasure as well as less adept manifestations of cultural spending. Here’s a fun game. We’ll describe an artwork or an installation, then present something non-art also found in Venice.
The Giardini pavilions featured multiple old-school Chuck E. Cheese animatronics.
But the clear star of this genre was the Belgian pavilion, “Mondo Cane,” with a clunky Somewhat Hitleresque painter a-painting and a chef rolling dough.
Everything was a little off, but the whole thing worked. The artist-duo actually states on their press release: “A show well worth the while of parents and their children!”
The artist states in a text, “I believe that if a person from the Middle Ages was sent into today’s world, he or she would pick up on smartphone use in a week.”
The text further explains that elements of the work draw on how emotions affect our habits, architecture, advertising, science, fashion, and public spaces. According to the wall text, this is a “hi-tech and lo-fi mingle, and ideas about how signs communicate in playful ways.”