By Nancy Nesvet Surrounded by water, filled with foreigners speaking different languages, in a city where getting lost in ancient alleyways is a regular occurrence, Venice provides the perfect venue for the most famous of the World’s Biennales. Almost every exhibit at the Venice Biennale deals with risks to our changing world, whether they be political or environmental. Located at ground zero, with the risk of inundation by water if global warming continues to produce floods and facing refugees arriving in Italy every day, Venice is the perfect place for government-sponsored art projects seen by an international public. On my first day at the Biennale, coming by vaporetto boat down the grand canal, I entered the former Arsenale grounds, where an arsenal of weapons was once housed. Walking further, I surveyed what Paolo Buratta notes in the “Introduction to Biennale Arte 2017 Short … [Read more...] about Art Makes the World Go Around: First Day at the Venice Biennale
Phyllida Barlow
THE MORNING AFTER: LOOKING BACK AT ART BASEL 2017
// About us, Audio/Visual, Current Exhibits, Exhibits, Featured, May/June 2017, Visual Arts
by Nancy Nesvet This year, Art Basel had something for everyone. Dominated by the motherlode of over 4,000 works of art shown by 226 exhibitors in the Galleries sector, Art Basel extended its universe to individual artist projects at Parcours, Unlimited, Statements and Features. The solo projects, the result of artist proposals, were politically aware, environmentally conscious and community oriented. The number of solo projects throughout these sectors largely identified with art concerned with social justice topics. In Unlimited, gallery directors chose 76 projects with “unlimited” size and scale proposed by artists. In the restaurant with the hardest to get reservation in town (or maybe the world), “Cooking the World,” 2017 (Hauser and Wirth, Zurich), Subhodh Gupta hosted dinners merging strangers who emerge friends around a u-shaped bar. Indian cooks composed meals with … [Read more...] about THE MORNING AFTER: LOOKING BACK AT ART BASEL 2017