I wish I could tell you what I think about the Venice Biennale
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Yesterday, I learned that there would be a good chance to see northern lights in my neck of the woods. Ordinarily, I don’t get too excited about astronomical events. But somehow, seeing this particular one in person had me interested.
My new apartment offers a wonderful view across an open field towards a range of hills just past the river. Looking outside of the window once it was dark didn’t offer any result, though.
I went outside, walked around a little bit, and I thought I saw some faint green glow in the sky. Then, long forgotten knowledge of the physics behind northern lights kicked in: if anything, I should be looking in a northern direction because that’s where I’d expect to see the strongest effect. So I did and, lo and behold, there was a definite, yet faint magenta glow in the sky.
I got out my iPhone and used the camera app to take some pictures, knowing what to expect. And yes, there they were, in glorious colours: the northern lights. Except that with the naked eye, things didn’t remotely look like that. A different app (Halide+ — I can only recommend it if you’re serious about photography on the iPhone) took a picture that was much closer to what I actually saw.
Back inside, my photo-critic brain slowly accepted the entrance of my atrophied astrophysics brain. OK, I realized, obviously Apple’s camera app really pushes the colours and the overall effect (I think I wrote about this before). That’s ridiculous. But is it any more ridiculous than what actual astronomers do? After all, many of their pictures show you things you can’t see with the naked eye.
In the end, the two parts of the brain signed a truce. In some fashion, those pictures are nonsense (the algorithms show you something you can’t see), but they’re also produced in a fashion that isn’t that dissimilar than what actual astronomers do.
With that in mind, now I needed to get a picture I’d be actually happy with. I went outside again, looked up into the sky and noticed the Big Dipper. Well, there was my picture:
The Venice Biennale has opened to… Well, to what? As someone who is interested in art, to some extent I follow this event. But much like in the case of World Press Photo, there is something incredibly dated about the whole idea. It just reeks of the times when the World’s Fair was a thing. Actually, that’s still a thing; I just don’t think anyone takes it serious any longer.
But countries having their own pavilions to showcase art — that’s such an opportunity to feature showboating and virtue signaling and so much more. If we want to have smarter conversations around art, I don’t think that’s a good format.
Also: Venice already has a serious problem with overtourism.
Anyway, there were a few interesting articles about this year’s event:
This Vanity Fair article irritated me simply because the names of the people noted therein were all presented in boldface. Then again, the name of the magazine is Vanity Fair, so what the hell was I expecting? But the article is interesting because the author can’t decide whether he wants to be critical of things — or fully embrace them. It’s a strange mix that makes for an interesting read.
The New York Times published an article that attempted to masquerade its reactionary nature with the kind of verbiage American intellectuals adopt when they want to be seen as the sensible person in the room (which is that newspaper’s whole spiel, isn’t it?). It’s written well, and by that I mean: the writer knows how to use words so that readers will see the various points, and yet they can only come to one conclusion (note the pretty basic propaganda ending). That all said, I do think the author has a point — at least to some extent; but I also don’t think that it’s quite as simple as he makes it sound.
Elle Griffin wrote a deep dive into the book publishing industry. It’s really, really interesting, in part because parts apply to photobook publishing as well: “58,000 titles published in a year […] 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies”. Obviously, you’ll need to scale down those numbers. Two thousand copies of a photobook sold would be considered a huge success for most publishers.
Anyway, have a look at all the details. As I said, they’re really interesting.
My only concern about the piece is that it seems to imply that books that don’t sell many copies do not deserve to be published. While that argument makes sense from a purely business point of view, if you think about the books themselves it’s pretty insane. I mean that would be the end of poetry, right? I don’t read poetry. But I also don’t think poetry books shouldn’t be published because too few people buy them. But maybe I’m reading too much into the article.
By now, I’ve read a lot of stories about the Holocaust. Even though I know a lot about it, this story about the shoes of the Stutthof Nazi camp blew my mind: After liberation, they found
“460 cubic metres, calculating, in total, “no less than 410,000 pairs of shoes”. In a museum established on the memorial site in 1962, a large glass casket in the former camp canteen houses several thousand pairs of shoes. The rest were discarded in the forest under communist rule and, as museum directors from then on have said, were “left to nature”.”
Consequently, you can walk around in the vicinity of the camp and still find shoes (or what’s left of them).
Lastly, I don’t know if you’re into painting in general and Michaël Borremans in particular. If you are, you might enjoy this long interview.
And there (or rather here) it is, the ending of yet another email. It’s a lovely day, so I will step away from the computer and re-enter the real world. There are more and more clouds moving in, meaning the light will be good for photographs.
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg