Curses and Blessings

I wouldn’t wish living in times like these on anyone. This, of course, is the irony of the title of Ralph Rugoff’s exhibition for this year’s Venice Biennale, “May You Live in Interesting Times.” On the surface, the phrase reads as a blessing; actually, it is a curse. Add to this the fact that this supposed “Chinese saying” is nothing of the kind, and you wind up with a double falseness conveyed in only six words. Ironic bemusement feels like the most useless and inappropriate of sensibilities today, yet here we are.

Last time around, Christine Macel’s “Viva Arte Viva” was widely panned for its spurious humanism, retrograde conception of art, and whiteness. Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward Gallery since 2006, has taken a very different path, but the results remain meretricious nonetheless. Strewn throughout the Arsenale and the central pavilion of the Giardini are relentless evocations of our wrecked present: mass death, climate change, war, social marginalization, artificial intelligence. The 79 artists, all of them living and virtually all of them sanctioned by the commercial market, get two chances, presenting different work in each of the two venues. Rugoff may have spurned the heavy reliance on dead artists and archives in Adam Szymczyk’s documenta 14, but in this mirrored structure he recalls that exhibition’s Athens/Kassel split. While this doubling has the virtue of a smaller selection of artists, it puts pressure on them to show twice as much work, which perhaps explains the stronger-than-usual presence of pieces already seen in prominent venues elsewhere.

Through it all—true to Rugoff’s title and to the detriment of. The “sculpture” is immediately next to the outdoor café, as if to issue an invitation: while the world burns, have a Spritz. Are we supposed to feel good about ourselves for feeling bad? Or bad about ourselves for not feeling worse? Take selfies and not care at all? Either way, the obscene provocation is laced with cynicism.