Ever try to drink from a firehose while standing in a sinking canal? That is basically what putting together the Venice Biennale feels like.
People love to argue about what makes a good Venice Biennale. Critics tear them apart. Collectors hunt for trophies. Artists hope their career skyrockets or crashes completely. Curators carry the weight of the entire contemporary art world on their shoulders for six grueling months.
Massimiliano Gioni knows this better than almost anyone. Having curated the 55th Venice Biennale with his massive Encyclopedic Palace, and having assembled High Waters: An Oral History of the Venice Biennale, he has spent decades listening to the messy, brilliant, and often chaotic stories of the people who make this beast run. A great Biennale isn't about spotless white cubes or polite academic theories. It's about organized panic, historical friction, and surviving the rising tide.
The Myth of the Clean White Cube
Most people walk into the Giardini or the Arsenale expecting a pristine museum experience. They want quiet rooms, perfect lighting, and neat little plaques telling them what to think.
Venice destroys that illusion immediately.
The buildings leak. The humidity ruins materials. The crowds crush your toes. Curators fighting to put together a show in Venice face logistical nightmares that would break a normal corporate manager. Gioni's oral history approach cuts right through the PR gloss. It shows you the sweat, the political backstabbing, the funding panics, and the midnight installations.
If you want a sterile art experience, stay home and look at a catalog. Venice works because it is messy, alive, and slightly dysfunctional.
Why Oral Histories Tell the Real Truth
Official art criticism lies to you. Press releases are marketing copy designed to make multi-million dollar art fairs sound like spiritual awakenings.
When you look at how books like High Waters capture the Venice Biennale, you get the unfiltered reality. You hear from the technicians, the disgruntled national pavilion commissioners, the security guards, and the artists whose crates got stuck in customs.
Art history is usually written by the victors or the loudest critics. Oral history ruins that cleanly packaged narrative. It introduces human error. It exposes the sheer luck involved when an exhibition actually comes together before opening day.
The Curatorial Trap of Trying to Save the World
Every two years, a new curator steps up to the plate and tries to explain the entire human condition through contemporary sculpture, video art, and weird installations made of recycled plastic.
It is an impossible job.
If your theme is too broad, you end up with a messy flea market of random objects. If your theme is too narrow, you suffocate the art. Gioni managed this back in 2013 by leaning into obsession. He channeled Marino Auriti's patent model for a 136-story imaginary museum, treating the entire Biennale like an encyclopedia of human madness and creativity.
A good Biennale embraces obsession over neatness. It lets outsider artists crash into established art-star elites. It mixes historical artifacts with brand-new commissions so you can't tell what era you are standing in.
Surviving the High Waters
Venice literally floods. The acqua alta rolls in, sirens wail, and wooden walkways appear overnight in St. Mark's Square.
Metaphorically, that is the exact state of global contemporary art. There is too much money, too many biennials, too many opinions, and too much noise. Every city from Seoul to Sao Paulo tries to host a mega-exhibition now.
Yet Venice remains the heavyweight champion because it carries history on its back. It forces you to deal with national pavilions built in the fascist era, gardens designed in the nineteenth century, and contemporary problems that feel entirely unprecedented.
To understand what makes a good Biennale, stop looking for perfection. Look for the friction between what artists want to say and what the crumbling city will actually allow them to pull off. Read the oral histories. Listen to the people who actually unload the trucks and fix the drywall at 3:00 AM. That is where the real art lives.
