Plinth

It’s a refrain that echoes throughout these heady preview days, when journalists and industry insiders are bussed in to ‘see the show’ (read: schmooze) before the hoi polloi. And with 2024 marking the Venice Biennale’s 60th edition, this one’s a biggie. The sheer scale of the week’s festivities means that even if a certain party proves beyond reach, there are a hundred others happening simultaneously to make you feel better about your inadequacy. When the Bjork story reaches me and my ragtag crew – writers and gallerists and PR types, everyone’s invited – we’re standing in the courtyard of a palazzo near Dorsoduro, clutching drinks that have come courtesy of an art foundation none of us had heard of until five minutes ago when we pooled our invitations and settled on the event that sounded like the best combo of ‘cool’ and ‘nearby’.

The night’s off to a good start, though we don’t stay long. In a bid to escape a man claiming to be a professor but behaving more like a pickup artist who’s just learnt about negging – ‘you’re the only girl in Venice brave enough to wear something like that,’ he says, looking pointedly at my dress – we slink off and head to a nearby cocktail party on a rooftop. It’s meant to be guestlist only, but I’m not above impersonations, especially when the Bellinis are this good.

For the record, I was far from the bravest girl in Venice (at least, not sartorially: I might be in the running for most gallant hangover). The Venice biennale’s opening week is about being seen in the city as much as seeing who’s on its walls, and the clothes are as amazing as you’d imagine. I saw a hipster wearing a cassock with Gola trainers. I saw a woman wearing a corset over her coat. I saw a guy with a doll of himself draped around his neck like a horrible Halloween albatross. As I type, sitting in Santa Maria Formosa with a glass of wine (hair of the dog), I can see a man who has curled his moustache into one stiff ringlet on each side, sticking out from his face at ninety-degree angles.

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No doubt, people are dressed to party, and all the good ones are happening on islands – on Thursday we were promised boats running to a German shindig till 3am, but the vaporetto never materialised; cue deflated retreat back to our hotel. Wednesday’s immediately infamous ‘Rick Owens’ party, populated by what spittle for Plaster magazine described as ‘fully Boschian apparitions […] wrestl[ing] with each other behind a bar that had run out of beer,’ where revellers were served scrambled egg and caviar sandwiches, sounds worth the murders you apparently had to commit to get in. (Sour grapes? Yes.)

It might seem bacchanalian, but the party scene at the biennale’s opening week is really just an extension of what’s happening at any opening on a bog-standard Tuesday night in London. That is, despite the week’s ostensible premise, art is more of a backdrop than a focal point – when all is said and done, these are social events. BREAKING NEWS: the artworld is manned by people drinking free alcohol together several times a week and calling it work. And for those who’ve breached its bar of entry, Venice preview week is like a biannual Christmas.

I, on the other hand, am a real professional. Saw loads of art, me. Bjork was long gone, but I made it to the Iceland pavilion to see work by Hidligunnur Birgisdottir; a lemony wetwipe promising ‘HEALTHY GUMS. HEALTHY LIFE’, plucked from a stack on a table in the middle of the room, proved very effective at getting a bit of sauce from lunch’s spaghetti vongole out of my jeans: 10/10. The nearby Irish pavilion’s film by Eimear Walshe made me laugh (in a good way), while the Egyptian pavilion – showing work by Wael Shawky, an opera called Drama 1882 chronicling the nation’s revolution against British imperialism – was a true standout.

In the Giardini, Archie Moore’s 65,000-year family tree kith and kin won Australia the coveted Golden Lion award. Written in ephemeral chalk on the pavilion walls over the past two months, Moore’s sprawling depiction of his lineage is both mournful and monumental. But along with the other most feted pavilions – Britain with John Akomfrah, France with Julien Creuzet, and Japan with Yukho Mori, who had found a way to make rotting fruit produce music – the queues rivalled nightmarish fashion drops in Shoreditch; something which presumably made the London hipsters in attendance feel right at home.

By this point in the day, we had walked nearly 30,000 steps, enough that my friend inadvertently coined a new word: arfy, pronounced like someone too tired (or too drunk) to say ‘art fatigue’. She was exactly right. We had terrible Arfy, and the only remedy was cichetti – Venice’s best invention, somewhere between bar snacks and tapas – so we installed ourselves in a nearby bar and put the world to rights over a spritz.

Even with bionic legs, the sheer scale of the biennale far exceeds any human being’s capacity to meaningfully absorb it, especially over just a few days. When you add in the satellite exhibitions at venues around the city – including one on a boat, which we stumbled onto on Friday afternoon, pulling weird slipper-bags over our shoes to, I dunno, avoid scuffing it? – the offering really is overwhelming. Since returning, I have asked eight separate people about their highlights, and everyone has said something different. That’s not a value judgement – just a caution not to take anyone who claims to have digested it too seriously.

Come Saturday, as the artsy hordes prepared to leave its winding alleys – having fulfilled the biennale’s title Foreigners Everywhere to a tee – the city felt like it might have sunk a few inches beneath the combined weight of everyone’s tabi shoes. Any comic book villains plotting to bring down the artworld establishment should take note – a strike on Venice last week would have decimated it in one fell swoop. (Alternatively, the plane home to London would have been a good target – I reckon that 80 to 90 percent of the people on that flight had been in Venice for the biennale; the guys in front of me were still networking across the aisle as we touched down in Stansted.) As we touched down in the real world, a question swam into view: what on earth had we all been doing there? Hell, I don't know – it's fascinating and expensive and gruelling and obligatory. See you in 2026!

By Emily Watkins