58th Venice Biennale: “May You Live in Interesting Times”

he curse at work in the 58th Venice Biennale comes not from the apocryphal Chinese malediction of the title, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” but the word “interesting” itself. The phrase has been repeated by Anglophone politicians, ever since a 1936 speech by British parliament member Austen Chamberlain, and utilizes “interesting” as a euphemism for violent, precarious, turbulent—all of which our times certainly are in political, environmental and economic terms. But what makes something “interesting” in the context of artistic or cultural production is something else entirely. It is an aesthetic category best theorized by the American cultural critic Sianne Ngai as “bound up with the perception of novelty (against a backdrop of the expected and familiar)” and also “as.”