Originally published by Vanity Fair
I was standing with Alma Allen in the middle of the US Pavilion atthe Venice Biennale. It was Tuesday, the first day of the VIP preview, and while it wasn’t packed, as it’s a tough invite to get—everyone present had been vetted by the exhibition’s governing body. Allen was wearing some fashionable sandals that he got in town during the weeks he was installing his show. The artist Oscar Murillo came in as Getty presidential scholar Sandra Jackson-Dumont walked out. Allen didn’t speak with them.
A year ago, Ireportedthat the State Department, in the midst of overhauls during President Donald Trump’s second term, was months late in releasing the grant application for the American Pavilion. In the middle of my reporting, the grant wasreleased. But this time there would be no panel from the National Endowment of the Arts sifting through the applications, no oversight from cultural officials and benighted curators—the usual process. The commissioning institution would not be a museum, but rather a nonprofit called The American Arts Conservancy, which, as Ireportedin November, is affiliated with some people in Trump’s orbit. After the AAC approached a few artists—Barbara Chase-Riboud has spoken out about declining, and William Eggleston was apparently asked—they went to Allen.
“My gallery told me if I did it, they would drop me,” Allen told me. “I was threatened by a curator that I know. They called me and said, ‘If you do this, I wastoldyou were going to do this, and if you do this, you will never have another show in the US in a museum.’”
He paused for a second and looked down at his shoes. “Really direct threats, which was kind of scary,” he went on. “And that’s what the galleries went through, and that’s what they experienced. And then they were like, ‘No, we don’t want to do this with you.’” (The galleries declined to comment.)
Let’s get it out of the way: The American Pavilion is not the best thing in Venice, not by a long shot. But I felt drawn to at least see Allen’s presentation, to see the show, to try and treat it purely as art, to get his side of the story. Allen was personable and game to talk about what the last few months have been like. The artist wants the sculptures to speak for themselves, but he agreed to an interview to explain himself.
It’s not MAGA art. But it also doesn’t say much at all. Allen said this was on purpose. He doesn’t think his art has much of a message. He doesn’t like explaining it. There is a public statement, an explanatory text at the end of the show, which includes the sentence: “Here is cancellation deployed as a physical act and in moral justification, and here is a repair. There are those who watch you and those who refuse to see you.” Regardless of the context, it’s hard not to read into the “cancellation” and feel it’s directed at Allen. He characterized his gallery’s rationale for dropping him ahead of the Biennale as, “Oh, so you don’t want to help because you’re scared of the cancel mob?”
Here’s how he described it to me. Allen’s work is inspired by a Bosch painting at the Accademia, and if anything, it contains some subtle references to his current situation, which is alsoourcurrent situation. There’s a sculpture of Don Quixote, whom he called a “feckless warrior” without elaborating. One work, he said, represents a “black sheep.” It’s a self-portrait. Another work is supposed to represent a nuclear bomb detonating, displayed while our country is at war, supposedly as a push to dismantle nuclear armaments. Does that count as commentary on the current moment?
“No one from the commissioning group even cares about it. They haven’t ever even asked me what any of the work means,” he said of the AAC. “They haven’t said, ‘What is it?’ And it’s like: I havea mushroom cloud.I wouldn’t do propaganda.”
As Allen argued, possibly correctly: The alternative was an empty American Pavilion. From a straw poll I conducted around Venice, that’s not what anyone wanted.
So we have a pavilion, even if it’s impossible to look at the work without hearing the noise. It’s just part of the controversy surrounding the entire official proceedings of the Venice Biennale, one that threatened to drown out the actual art on display. A primer: Last week, the international jury resigned, citing a statement from a week earlier about withholding prizes from countries with leaders charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The Golden Lion and the Silver Lion were replaced with Visitors’ Lions, which will be handed out in November. The parlor game of guessing who would win the various awards, often played at the Biennale’s cocktail parties and late dinners? Not happening this year.
Israel, one of the countries the original letter from the jury seems to be aimed at, still has its pavilion, relocated from the Giardini to the Arsenale. On Wednesday, gun-toting Venetianpoliziahuddled around the entrance of the abandoned pavilion, in case of a protest. Russia has a pavilion for the first time since 2019, the last Biennale that occurred prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I visited for journalistic purposes, and it was, perhaps to be expected, neither a pro-war diatribe nor an anti-Putin screed. The performers were wearing drapes over their heads and chanting to drone music while smoking a hookah, and there were flowers everywhere.
And then there’s the absence of curator Koyo Kouoh, who tragically died of cancer shortly after being diagnosed in 2025. Her curatorial team gamely stepped up to finish the show based on what she’d done, but there was still a year of work left, and a committee has never curated this biennial. Several visiting unaffiliated curators, who would not go on the record for this story with quotes, begged for more cohesion.
There are highlights of the curated sector. The Austrian Pavilion is probably the talk of the Biennale, featuring Florentina Holzinger’s batshit crazy, borderline unsafe performances. Upside-down performers hang from a gigantic bell, clanging their torsos against the metal. Some are zooming around on jet skis in a water tank that’s impressively built into the pavilion building that’s stood in the Giardini since the 1930s. The curated sector is a bit forgettable, all grays and browns and yellows, as one curator put it. I loved Otobong Nkanga’s installation on the exterior of the central pavilion, plus a thrilling display from Alvaro Barrington, who drove a gigantic truck from London and installed new paintings on the side of it. If this Biennale mints any art stars, there you have them.
The mood in Venice is still borderline ecstatic, full of gossip, parties, and people chatting about art in their respective cities, trading business cards, discovering new talent, eating, drinking, and stumbling around, running into old friends. There’s a critical mass of incredible shows—but they’re almost all at private museums, funded by collectors or galleries, staged at palazzos either owned by the benefactors or rented from the City of Venice.
New this year is AMA Venezia, the brainchild of collector Laurent Asscher, who meticulously restored a former soap factory in Cannaregio to inaugurate his own space. He even has a little bar in the middle, dubbed Larry’s Bar, featuring photos ofLarry Gagosian—including the iconicJean Pigozzisnap of him with Charles Saatchi and Leo Castelli reading an art book on a yacht in St. Barths—plus Elizabeth Peyton’s portrait of Gagosian, which is such a treat to see.
The show at AMA, “AURA,” has a series of grotto-esque rooms devoted to single artists—Joseph Yaeger, Brandon Morris, Sang Woo Kim—before opening up into a grand exposed-brick space that includes Christopher Wool, Laura Owens, and a new painting by Jenny Saville, who is showing in town at the Ca’ Pesaro palazzo.
The highlight of “AURA”, and perhaps one of the best things in Venice, is Tino Sehgal’sThe Kiss. It’s a work that first premiered in 2002, but it hasn’t been seen in years—and never like this. The controversial performance takes place in a pitch-black room, and the performers are completely nude. At first, you see nothing, and there’s a bit of knocking around in the space. After a few minutes, your eyes gradually adjust, and the performers, the maybe-lovers, come into view, flesh on the ground, writhing and making out and embracing. The enigmatic artist even gave a talk with Asscher at the space, a rare public dialogue.The Kisshas got more raw power and charisma than anything I saw earlier at the Giardini.
At the Palazzo Diedo, the private museum established by Nicolas Berggruen in 2022, there’s a group show curated by Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli. I loved Sanya Kantarovsky’s new paintings, installed at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. The estate of the artist Matthew Wong, who died by suicide in 2019, staged a grand show of rarely seen paintings and works on paper, a sweeping survey of an incredibly talented artist, now famous for insane auction prices.River at Dusksold for $6.6 million,The Night Watchersold for $5.9 million, andGreen Roomsold for $5.3 million. I knew Wong, who loved being on the ground at biennales and art fairs. He would have adored having a big show in Venice.
The Peggy Guggenheim Foundation is, for the uninitiated, the palazzo on the Grand Canal where Peggy lived with her prized paintings, before opening her doors to the public in 1951. Right now, the Guggenheim is exhibiting work that Peggy showed at her London gallery over the course of just 18 months—she put on Wassily Kandinsky’s first show in England and put the first Lucien Freud ever on view anywhere. Advisers to the gallery? Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett. Not too shabby.
It wouldn’t be a Venice Biennale unless François Pinault staged blockbuster exhibitions at his two gigantic, blissfully restored spaces, the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta Della Dogana: Michael Armitage at the former, Lorna Simpson at the latter. Another new space getting a lot of attention all week was the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, an outpost that’s been in the works for eight years. On Thursday morning, everyone in town lined up before 9 a.m. for shuttle gondoliers who took them to the island of San Giacomo.
All morning extra-sized barges loaded up passengers from the Giardini, scooted around the Arsenale, past the famous glass-blowing island of Murano, and then approached the Island of San Giacomo—a tiny speck on a map, but quite formidable in person. It’s been inhabited since 1000, and after a few hundred years of housing shipwrecked sailors, Cistercian nuns opened a convent there. Most recently, it was a storage site for canon powder.
Hugh Hayden’sHuff and a Puffon Sandretto Island.
On Thursday morning, a line of private boats snaked around the perimeter, and once passengers disembarked, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo was there to greet each visitor. Among the hundreds of people, I spotted artists Maurizio Cattelan and Josh Kline near one hall, and by another, Sheikha al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, chairperson of Qatar Museums. There are two large-scale exhibition spaces, one with a solo show of work by Matt Copson and another that includes a small slice of the family’s extensive art holdings. Most prominently was Hugh Hayden’s permanent new sculpture, a functioning chapel that ingeniously bends at an acute angle. When I walked inside, Simon de Pury, with his typical excitement, introduced me to the artist’s mother.
The most prominent cultural conduit on the scene this week wasn’t a single collector but Chanel’s blow-out dinner, followed by a big palazzo bash. Since Yana Peel became the president of arts, culture, and heritage at the fashion house, it has thrown one of the best parties in Venice each year, this time at the Palazzo Giustinian Brandolini. Guests included the Whitney’s Scott Rothkopf, Dr. Nicholas Cullinan from the British Museum, Victoria Siddall of the National Portrait Gallery in London, Guggenheim director and CEO Mariët Westermann, Philip Tinari, the deputy director of the Tai Kwun complex in Hong Kong, and Diane von Fürstenberg, who now lives in Venice full time. I spotted collectors such as Maja Hoffmann, Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, dealer Sadie Coles, artists such as Armitage and Barrington, and the curator Mark Godfrey.
Midway through the dinner, Obrist introduced the musical guest, who he said was an artist he included in the Holy See Pavilion, the official entry by the Vatican City, overseen by the pope himself. To the shock of the crowd, it was Patti Smith, fresh from New York that morning. She loved the meal—“the best food I’ve ever had at a large gathering, maybe because we’re in Italy, in Venice,” she said. On the menu: saffron risotto with Venetian artichokes, and beef tagliata “Robespierre style.” Smith sang a song she wrote for the occasion, which can only be described as a total flex. And then she introduced a song that she wrote with her late husband, MC5 guitarist Fred Smith, “the love of my life,” and asked the crowd to sing along. It was “Because the Night.” Everyone—all the billionaire collectors, all the artists—sang.
Afterward, there were desserts, drinks, and Grammy-winning jazz performers. But whatever the evening cost wasn’t nearly as much as Chanel had already spent on supporting the arts. Earlier that day, it was announced that the Chanel Next Prize had been awarded to 10 artists—Ambrose Akinmusire, Andrea Peña, Ayoung Kim, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Emeka Ogboh, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Pan Daijing, Payal Kapadia, Pol Taburet, and Álvaro Urbano—each of whom received a grant of 100,000 euros.
Then there’s what some are calling the “real” American pavilion: the Fondazione Prada, the art space owned by Miuccia Prada. Mrs. Prada may be best known for, you know,Prada,but make no mistake: She is one of the world’s greatest art collectors and cultural benefactors, putting on ambitious shows and spreading the gospel of contemporary art.
Exhibition view ofHelter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince.
The show there is “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince.” Curated by Nancy Spector, it’s a collision of two artists who have pushed the boundaries of conceptual appropriation, true shape-shifters, vigilante raconteurs of American poignance and dread.Jafa exploded on the art world a decade ago, whenLove Is the Message, the Message Is Deathhad a surprise debut at Art Basel in Switzerland, before becoming a sensation when Gavin Brown debuted it in New York ahead of the 2016 election. Jafa has since expanded his practice into more film, installation, large-scale sculpture, and found photography, constantly switching up his style.
I don’t need to tell you about Richard Prince, but still, seeing the work here is a revelation. Spector’s idea of pairing Jafa with Prince is novel at first, but wholly natural when seen together. Most of the works are
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