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Seventeen biennales were presented in September 2008. Nine of those were in Asia. Add to that a glut of Art Fairs optimistically escalating in numbers with the vapid hope to parallel bloated auction results for contemporary Asian art and one begins to wonder whether the Tour d’Asia has become a little too grand. Have we reached that point of suffocation, of Post-Curiosity as Vasif Kortun, curator of two past Istanbul Biennials, suggests and, indeed, are biennales and art fairs morphing agendas under market pressure?1
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his is not a new idea and is one that has emerged out of a fading critical perspective across biennales and triennials globally. Asia has a total of nineteen active biennales and triennials in circulation and with over fifty major art fairs internationally, punctuated by bi-annual super-auctions in New York, London and Hong Kong, the demand for contemporary Asian art has reached fever pitch. Such statistics propose a far greater dilemma than ‘sameness’ or ‘blur’. They raise the questions, ‘What do we demand of these events—sensational entertainment, constantly bigger, better, newer?’ and ‘What do these events demand of their audiences physically, intellectually and, we should not forget, emotionally?’
With cultural tourism campaigns reaching new levels under initiatives such as ‘Art Compass’ which corralled biennales and triennials in Sydney, Gwangju, Singapore, Shanghai and Yokohama under a marketing umbrella, and the growing trend to present art fairs as adjunct events to biennales, the cynics amongst us will recognise a new kind of fiscal positioning to these expositions. Has the biennale finally become accountable? It is an interesting question domestically as we approach the Sixth Asia-Pacific Triennial at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline