At the Venice Biennale

I have been posting pictures from this year's Venice Biennale over the past week, and now the NY Times has a slide show. This extravaganza is a way for Europe's art insiders -- culture ministers, curators of famous museums, big-name artists -- to promote things that interest them at the moment, so it gives a sense of the public side of the European art scene. The carnival atmosphere and the shear mass of the thing make it a bad environment for small or quiet works; to get noticed at the Biennale, arts has to be big and eye-catching. Above is an installation by Thomas Hirschorn composed largely of smashed electronic gear that looks weirdly compelling.

Much attention gets showered on gimmicks; this year, Swiss artist Urs Fischer's recreation of famous marble sculptures as working wax candles, some of them dressed in modern clothes.

Carol Vogel of the Times complained that the exhibit does not feature enough "new, cutting-edge artists."

Much of this Biennale is more subdued and less experimental than in years past, more of a nostalgic meditation on life and art than a revelatory peek into the future.

Which pretty much sums up the bored, thrill-seeking attitude toward art that I hate, not to mention the cooler-than-thou pose of the rebel aesthete. What's wrong with nostalgic meditation on life and art? For a person with tastes as retrograde as mine, these giant installations that mix found objects, hi-tech illuminations, robots, and video seem anything but nostalgic, but I guess those who keep up have been seeing them for 20 years and no longer find them all that interesting. My attitude toward such productions has evolved, a little. I used to flat out hate them. Now I feel mainly a mild curiosity, partly anthropological, partly psychological, partly my ongoing, low-intensity search for art that is modern but still has something to say to my archaic soul.