The Florence Biennale: A Typical Case Study
(To show or not to show. That is the question)
By Edward Rubin

	Edward Rubin is a New York City based writer and artist. His writings appear regularly in such publications as Art & Antiques, Sculpture, Hispanic Outlook, New York Arts and Art Fairs International magazines.

Believe it or not, worldwide, there are over three hundred Biennales. It seems that every week another city eager to become a cultural tourist destination gives birth to yet another Biennale. And they do come in all shapes. Some are invitational only, others you can buy your way into. Some accept galleries only, other accept artists only, while still others accept both. Some are well respected, others not worth the paper that they are advertised on. And participation in all, no matter who foots the bill, costs an arm and a leg. While there are many advantages for an artist to make a Biennale appearance, in addition to acquiring another resume credit — the chief one being the actual experience of taking part in an international exhibition — one must be very careful when reading the fine print, calculating the costs, in short, doing the necessary homework for each Biennale they are interested in approaching. Once your work is accepted be prepared to network like crazy, as the wheel that squeaks the loudest and longest usually gets greased. Below is just one of many Biennales that I recently visited. Think of it as a case study.

	Fortezza da Basso

The Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art is the largest artist supported Biennale in the world. Celebrating its sixth edition this December, the exhibition, held at the Fortezza da Basso, a Renaissance fortress in the city of Florence, is open to any artist who can afford to pay the entrance fee. Depending on whether you want a wall space for your art (roughly seven by nine feet) or 15 square feet of floor space for your sculpture the registration fee is 2400 Euros, which, at the time of this writing is $3,266. And that does not include shipping or travel expenses. With airfare, hotel and meals factored in, the costs run, depending on whether you are going First Class or On The Cheap, between five and ten thousand dollars. Still, nearly 50% of the 850 artists (from some seventy countries) that exhibited their work in 2005 — many carrying their work rather than shipping to save money and avoid what one artist called the "petty tyrant personality of custom agents" — personally attended the Biennale.

	Christo and Jeanne-Claude awarded by Pasquale and Piero Celona

As the Florence Biennale story goes, ten years ago, the Celona brothers, Pasquale the painter and Piero the teacher, tired of drowning in classical art, and sensing, as some critics claim, the money to be made, decided to turn Florence into Italy's center of contemporary art, ironically, the same position that it occupied during the Renaissance when Masaccio, Donatello and Brunelleschi were all the rage. While the brothers are the acknowledged power behind the throne — it is up to them to see that government regulations are met, politicians kept happy and the hundreds of artists that the Biennale attracts are efficiently filtered through their system — it is the responsibility of the Biennale’s Art Director, as chief aesthetician, directional strategist and raconteur, to sell the Florence Biennale to the Art World. For the last four editions of the Biennale, John Spike, the noted Renaissance scholar, occupied the Biennale’s throne. This year, the Brazilian Diplomat Emanuel von Lauestein Massarani, also the current head of the Cultural Heritage Office of the Legislative Assembly of San Paulo State, is titular king.

	Gilbert & George, Dawn, 2005, 284 cm x 338 cm.

To keep the exhibiting artists happy and the public entertained during exhibition’s the 9 days, the Biennale sponsors daily panels and lectures. For the artists alone, there are dinners, parties, an award celebration and a “dressed to the nines” closing banquet. Adding Hollywood excitement and academic cache, internationally recognized artists, historians and curators, are invited to show their work, lecture, sit on the jury and mingle with the exhibiting artists. Recent art star attendees have included David Hockney (2003) Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Op Art artist Richard Anuszkiewicz (2005). Doing star turns this year are celebrity artists Gilbert & George and writer, TV personality, Tim Marlow, the exhibitions director of the London’s White Cube Gallery. Among the jurors that will be lecturing are Rosa Tejada, Associate Museum Educator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, David Rubin, Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum and Gregorio Luke, Director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

With 3000 paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos on view, unless you jog from one end of the Fortezza da Basso to the other, it takes a couple of days to adequately digest the art. Curating the art into the exhibition — a humongous undertaking by any standards — is the responsibility of Massarani, the Celona Brothers and Sandra Mirayanda and Angelina Herrera, the Biennale’s two coordinators. It takes three days and nine people to hang the exhibition. “This is a random hanging in the John Spike Tradition,” Mirayanda said. “Since each artist is considered to represent himself not a nation, the works from the different countries are interspersed. We make sure that there are not any accidental groupings. If the artists saw there was planning, they would be justified in wanting to know why they weren't located here or there. So far less than 1% of artists have complained about their experiences."

Of course, a few complaints among the artists that I spoke with, though buried among praise, did bubble up. Chief among them, perhaps unavoidable in an open enrollment exhibition this large was the lack of curatorial focus and the overall undistinguished quality of the work being shown. A number of artists placed the blame on the "founding fathers" who they felt were more interested in inflating participation than to really selecting quality works. Quick to weigh in on these issues were John Spike and juror David Rubin. "All curatorial focus amounts to is jetting the curator to Peru to find the one artist in the country who looks like the curator's favorite artist in Berlin and London" Spike argued. "And that is, when you look at it, more accurately described as cultural imperialism. Here we have surprises."

	Writer, TV personality, Tim Marlow, the exhibitions director of the London’s White Cube Gallery. Gilbert and George in the background.

As far as quality, juror Rubin took a populist position. "In a truly democratic system, the lesser works are inherently part of the composition" Rubin says, "because the point is that we are celebrating creativity that is an integral part of our humanity. To be inclusive we recognize that there is great, good, weak and bad art - but all of it collectively represents creativity. I tell artists who ask me to view the Biennale as a gathering, a conference of sorts, where artists from all over the world can get together just to celebrate being an artist." Indeed, celebration, the very experience of going to the Florence Biennale, making friends and showing their work alongside artists from all over the world was the highlight of virtually every artist that I spoke to. The awards ceremonies, the closing banquet, and the art laden city of Florence, with its fabulous restaurants, were also mentioned as cherished memories.

Most surprisingly, I learned that government agencies, educational institutions and arts organizations are starting to fund artist participation in the Biennale. According to the Florence Biennale more than 65% of the time artists are sponsored by either private or public institutions. Of course you have to be inventive and know where, how, and when to apply. Karin Giusti an art professor at Brooklyn College - she also heads their sculpture department - was given a Creative Achievement Award by the college that enabled her to go to Florence in 2005. Artist Dorotha Grace Lemeh, Coordinator of Advising at Pennsylvania State College was given money by her university and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts. Henry Schoebel and Anthony Pessler, artists and professors at Arizona State College had their registration fee and airfare picked up by their college. Alaskan artist, Donald Ricker was given two career grants from the Alaska State Council on the Arts. Other options for the enterprising exist too. A law firm sponsored Australian artist John Dahlsen in exchange for a work of art while a collector of Los Angeles artist Jim Morphesis's work gifted him with a first class ticket to the Biennale.

Though “the buyers haven't found the Florence Biennale just yet, works of art are being bought" Florida artist and three time Biennale attendee James Langston was quick to note, “And connections of all kinds are being made.” As a direct result of showing at the Biennale New York Sculptor Carole Feuerman and Dutch sculptor Jackie Sleper were invited to the Austrian Biennale and asked to exhibit their work at OPEN2007 in Venice this fall. Woodstock, New York, artist Shelley Parriot was invited to participate in a three-artist exhibition at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. Andrew Lyght, from British Guyana, now living in New York, was picked up by the StarArte Gallery, in both Florence and New York. And Hung, an artist who splits his time between China and Italy, was selected to serve on "the organizing committee cum juror" at Romania's first Biennale. And this list goes on and on. Unless artists don’t care where they hang their work, making a decision whether or not to participate in any exhibition, should be based on facts. Not that whimsy and sperm of the moment choices do not play a part in decision making but once big money is involved “to show or not to show” ups the ante. Like any investment, research, especially talking to artists who have exhibited at a particular Biennale that you are interested in, is the best way to find out what’s cooking. Other than going to the Biennale’s website, which is a given, there are many ways to gather the information that to need. You can ask the Biennale to supply you with artist references. You can get names of the exhibiting artists directly from the Biennale’s catalogue and then Google them or if you feel particularly flushed, you can visit the Biennale and check it out in person. The thing to remember, as every artist that I spoke to reiterated, is to expect nothing more than a grand experience. “Everything is a gamble,” one artist after another said. “All I did was to plan to have fun, which I did have, and anything extra was a plus.”

Above: Ed Rubin (right) with friend David Rubin. Photo was taken Saturday, December 8, 2007 at the Gala Dinner at the Florence Biennale where David, who is currently curator of Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum, gave a lecture and was one of the Biennale jurors. Ed Rubin was the Master of Ceremonies and the liaison between the 850 international exhibiting artists and the Biennale management, a position he created after seeing a need for it..

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