Biennale and much more - The best of Contemporary...

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Venice during the Biennale is a city absolutely glittering with what Saul Bellow called 'event glamour.' The world's wealthiest collectors descend on the lagoon, journalists and museum folk prowl the city avidly, and every other building, from refurbished palazzos on the Grand Canal to derelict rooms off forgotten alleys, seems to be hosting an exhibition. The director of this year's show is the Frankfurt-based curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum. Birnbaum's displays - one in the Arsenale, the other at the former Italian pavilion, now called the Palazzo delle Esposizione, in the Giardini - has outdone Storr and produced one of the best Biennales of the last decade. This year, the US won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion with a retrospective of the work of Bruce Nauman, the most influential artist of his generation. But it's worth saying first that many of the 'collateral events' - the shows around Venice that may or may not be affiliated with the Biennale - are so good this year that they upstage the main event. At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a scintillating Robert Rauschenberg show called 'Gluts.' Coming a year after the artist's death, it's a survey of 40 little-known sculptural works made in the '80s and '90s from recycled metal. He called them 'gluts' because a glut in the oil market had depressed the economy and made more of this detritus available. There's an air of insouciance but also formal precision about the show. But the really great show in Venice this year is at the Palazzo Fortuny. Called 'In-finitum,' it's the third in a trilogy of shows conceived by the Belgian dealer Axel Vervoordt. It's a cornucopia of more than 300 works displayed over four floors, ranging from ancient archeological objects to Old Masters, Asian art, modern masters, and a wide array of contemporary artists. A substantial section is devoted to unfinished works by Cezanne, Bonnard, George Romney, and Marlene Dumas, among others. Just as other parts of the display make us question the afterlife of artworks, this extraordinary section prompts all sorts of speculations on the genesis of artworks and the whole questionable idea of 'finish.' Two years ago François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and art collector who owns Christie’s, beat out the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the 17th-century Dogana, the former customs house, signing a 33-year agreement with the City of Venice to transform it into a gallery to show off his enormous collection. In 2004 he bought the 18th-century Palazzo Grassi and hired the Japanese architect Tadao Ando to renovate the building. It opened in 2007 filled with work by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Rudolf Stingel and others. Mr. Ando has also renovated the Dogana. The inaugural exhibition, “Mapping the Studio,” features works by artists he has collected over the years: Britons like Rachel Whiteread and Jake and Dinos Chapman; Americans including Cy Twombly, Richard Prince and Bruce Nauman; and the Swiss team Fischli & Weiss.