Art has nothing to do with the UN: Internationalism as rhetoric at the Venice Biennale

The rhetoric of the Venice Biennale as the ‘UN of art’ is the argument most frequently invoked by the cultural institution to assert its independence from politics. By constructing an ecumenical narrative of identity, the Biennale has, over time, produced an institutional mythopoesis that has transformed it into a state of exception in the Agambian sense. But this assumption is yet another insidious legacy of the Italian fascist regime that has slipped into the democratic mainstream.

The first time the Biennale’s myth-making machine coined the metaphor of the ‘Geneva of the arts’ was in 1931. From that moment on, the Venetian institution became the main strategic hub through which all Italian governments have exercised their soft power.

The “marvelous weapon”

In 1930, the Italian Fascist government issued a decree stripping the city of Venice of the International Art Exhibition that it had conceived and established thirty years earlier. It placed the exhibition under the direct control of the Ministry of Popular Culture, at the apex of the hierarchy of state cultural institutions; this was not merely a bureaucratic formality, but the beginning of a strategy of centralisation. Direct state control turns the International Exhibition into a propaganda tool for the regime. To formalise the removal of ownership from the City of Venice to the Italian State, the government changed the institution’s name, and the International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice became “La Biennale di Venezia: International Art Exhibition”. The new name echoes the nature of its origins, but every word is corrupted and distorted, taking on another, ambiguous meaning. The intended internationalism of its origins –aimed at “learning and comparing” and “enriching the intellectual heritage of young artists” through “colleagues from other nations”– has degenerated into mere utilitarianism, turning the Biennale into an indispensable platform for the regime’s project of geopolitical diplomacy.

Established to introduce the newly unified Italy to international artistic movements, the regime intended to make the Biennale the place where ‘foreigners now come to see what Italian art achieves and what the Italian organisation is able to draw from it’. The continuity concealed by the new name is as ambiguous as the stated intention “not to make radical changes” to the institution, but merely to introduce “adjustments” to “bring a greater sense of method and a more precise drive for power to an area where, until now, work had been carried out in a somewhat informal manner, almost without realising the marvelous weapon that was being forged”.

A marvelous weapon, indeed. For what more effective instrument of power could there be than one that looks like a gift, that arrives bearing culture, beauty, and the promise of internationalism, only to quietly enforce a single nation's dominion over the very idea of art itself?

In the beginning: the “Geneva of the Arts”

After the state seized power over the exhibition, the Biennale became colloquially known as the "Geneva of the Arts" because, like Geneva, it hosted international diplomacy under the appearance of neutrality and universality. The Biennale became the place where nations confront one another through art, concealing behind the universal language of culture the power relations that govern its stage. In the decades following, the press and public took up this idiomatic expression.[1] [ In his 1931 inaugural speech at the Biennale, Minister of National Education Massimo De Sabbata paved the way for the rhetoric of the "sense of the universal", as the place where "all men" can come together and feel what is "common in the deepest part of their soul", drawing a parallel between the uniqueness of Italian cities like Venice and Rome. In the same period, secretary general Antonio Maraini insisted on the singularity of Venice as the "only permanent international gathering of the arts from across the world," and on the Biennale as "the oldest, most perfect and complete realization of the great dream of universal pacification — a world transformed into a perpetual earthly paradise, free of all borders." Even when not directly cited, the spirit of the League of Nations, established a decade prior with the supposed aim of maintaining peace through collective negotiation, hovers over the rhetoric surrounding the centralisaiton of the Biennale. Maraini then makes it explicit in 1931, writing in an article: "… by then the League of Nations will surely have taken notice of the Biennale's existence, recognizing in it the only organization with the tradition and the means to be entrusted with tasks of general interest for contemporary art." In 1932, the First International Congress of Contemporary Art was held in Venice. On that occasion, the Biennale was entrusted with the role of “a hub for the study of issues relating to contemporary art and for the organisation of future congresses”. This act officially recognises the Biennale as the ‘Geneva of Art’, to the extent that even The Times would go on to describe it as such. At the same time, the head of the Biennale’s Press Office maintains that, in the garden that hosts the international exhibition, “the most harmonious and united League of Nations in the field of art has been realised”.

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In the fascist propaganda narrative, the Biennale is a unique venue, not least because of the presence of the national pavilions. Whilst relations with other countries were originally managed by the International Art Exhibition — that is, by the city of Venice — through a form of high-level cultural diplomacy, under the fascist government these relations changed and diplomacy took on a different character. The fascist government then adopted this pre-existing diplomatic structure and exploited it in a deliberate and systematic manner. The pavilions became territorial markers, physical manifestations, in the form of architecture, of national sovereignty.

The exhibition transformed into a crucial platform for the fascist state’s foreign policy, a venue where Italy could present itself as a cultural superpower and negotiate political and economic relations with other nations, under the guise of art. The Biennale served as both a tool and a showcase for a carefully crafted political propaganda campaign; it was where Italy could vividly demonstrate that it was a nation capable of sitting at the same table as the great powers.

By adopting the pacifist rhetoric exemplified by the League of Nations, the Mussolini regime instrumentalised the Biennale for the promotion of Italian identity and art in relation to foreign art. The careful orchestration of propaganda pushed the press to emphasise the notion that art was an instrument of peaceful coexistence among peoples, and the Biennale therefore became the place par excellence for the achievement of such a goal.

Like the League of Nations, the Biennale brought sovereign states together in a shared space; like the League of Nations, it operated through the formal recognition of national identities; like the League of Nations, it produced a rhetoric of international brotherhood that coexisted, without apparent contradiction, with the realpolitik interests of its most powerful members. The metaphor was profoundly cynical, for Mussolini's Italy used rhetorical emphasis to present its most prestigious cultural institution as the "Geneva of the Arts," while in reality it was actively undermining the League of Nations. In the same decade, the League of Nations expelled Italy in response to its

invasion of Ethiopia.

The internationalism of the Biennale was a diplomatic fiction, a cultural alibi for a regime that had no interest whatsoever in the values the League of Nations claimed to represent. Art is not an innocent field, and here it becomes a sophisticated weapon of propaganda and diplomatic positioning. The Biennale is a “formidable weapon" in which internationalism is a label and, like all labels, a narrative resource of power.

The reinvention of an internationalist lexicon

In 1948, Italy emergeds from the war defeated and morally devastated by twenty years of fascism. The cultural institutions that the regime had directly controlled bore the heaviest burden. The new Italian democratic government's decision to make the Biennale the first cultural institution to restart after the war was not simply a pragmatic choice, but a symbolic act, a declaration that the most the Italian cultural institution most entangled with fascist governance could return to being democratic and in service of a cultural project. In this way, other Italian institutions would have a viable model to follow. The prestige of the institution, built over time and internationally recognized (despite a decade of fascist management) was too precious an asset in a country that had to construct a new democratic identity on new civic ideals. It was necessary to begin with the formation of a new rhetoric to replace the fascist one that had penetrated every sphere of public and cultural life: a new language capable of using the same institutional structure, but toward opposite ideological ends.

Architect and member of the National Liberation Committee Giovanni Ponti was tasked with the postwar re-establishment of the Venice Biennale. In the preface of the Biennale’s1948 catalogue, Ponti writes: "art invites all men, beyond national borders, beyond ideological barriers, to a language that should unite them in a humanistic understanding and in a universal family against all Babel-like disunity and disharmony." Keeping internationality at the center as the institution's defining characteristic, Ponti returns to the original rhetoric of the exhibition, emphasizing the unity of all peoples under the banner of artistic showcasing. He calls it a "universal family," eliminating any military or geopolitical reference evoking the League of Nations.

Yet the democratic reinvention of 1948 changes the rhetoric without changing the structure. The institution remains under government control, and the national pavilions remain as sovereign territorial markers within the exhibition area on Italian soil. Every nation that owns a pavilion maintains its own permanent structure, obtains its position in that territory based on the diplomatic power it can deploy, and — in continuity with what came before — diplomatic relations remain, inevitably, at the governmental level. Without directly stating so, the new Biennale continued the fascist regime’s logic of national prestige, diplomatic positioning and economic interest. What changed was simply the cultural language.

An attempt to rethink the national pavilion system didn’t come until 1993, when artistic director Achille Bonito Oliva writes that it is "no longer possible to recognize the purity of the national nucleus, but rather the positive contribution of a transnationality, an interweaving of peoples that produces cultural eclecticism." He called for the exhibition to no longer present itself "as the United Nations of Art," but as a "mosaic" — a transnational space in which national belonging would not be the primary organizing principle. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the geopolitical order established at Yalta in 1945 had dissolved. In other words, the Cold War framework that had structured the rigid diplomatic choreography of the Biennale for the previous forty years had disappeared. For Bonito Oliva, this was precisely the moment to rethink the national pavilion system and move the Biennale toward a real transnationality.

The institution did not seize this opportunity.

In the years that followed, not only were there no further attempts to rethink the national pavilion system, but on the contrary: an expansion and search for new institutional venues to accommodate them (the Arsenale in 1999), and a growing emphasis on the diplomatic and economic relations that make access to the institution possible. The post-Cold War moment, which seemed to open toward a genuinely transnational cultural space, instead inaugurated a period of intensified re-nationalization.

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The UN, or Rather NATO?

In 2011, economist and Biennale president Paolo Baratta described the increase in national participations as evidence of a "fascinating phenomenon" and compares the "gathering of national representatives in Venice" to "a small UN." Appointed to the presidency of the Biennale by the center-left government and supported by a broad parliamentary majority, Baratta originally took the position  in 1998, immediately following of the approval of the law that reinstalls the Biennale as a site of "cultural society", that is, a public entity governed by the rules of the civil code and, for contracts, by private law. In essence, the reform "puts the Biennale in a position to be governed like a company," whose president was endowed with his own powers, particularly of "impulse and promotion of activities." Baratta stepped down in 2001, only to take the position again in 2008. In the meantime, in 2004, the Biennale became a foundation, namely a legal entity under private law whose assets include state-contributed properties, whose operations are guaranteed by ordinary contributions from the Ministry of Culture and whose oversight and direction remain a public responsibility insofar as the president is appointed by the Minister of Culture. Baratta remained president until 2020, and, during his long tenure, transformed the Biennale into a profitable enterprise, primarily through the entry of sponsors, while repositioning it internationally.

Baratta's rhetoric draws continuously from the history of the institution he presides over, but — as a businessman — he transforms it into a resource to be capitalized, into a slogan, flattening any complexity. In this flattening, the historic definition "Geneva of the Arts" is dusted off and simply updated to "UN of the Arts," without questioning what context had produced that idiom in the first place. This rhetoric, ridden for twenty years, has profited from the international sovereigntist surge, reinforcing the assertion of national identities while maintaining the pacifist and ecumenical rhetoric of a welcoming "place of encounter and dialogue 'on equal terms' between countries." Baratta's rhetoric, despite the widespread belief that the pavilion structure is obsolete, on the contrary "manifests as a growing confidence in the exhibition and with it the recognition of the usefulness of being present." Through Baratta’s transformation of Biennale into a business by way of targeted luxury brand sponsorship and colonization, the Giardini begin to close, their public character progressively eroded. At the same time, this semi-privatisation now required the Biennale to protect the permanent venues of the nations present, which continuously complain about high maintenance costs (no longer upheld by the Municipality of Venice).

Today, the "Biennale gardens” have taken on the characteristics of what urban theorists call a "gated community", or physically enclosed area with restricted access, monitored by private security, under video surveillance and governed by internal rules designed to protect and isolate those inside from those outside. This is the spatial reality behind Baratta's new rhetoric of the "UN of the Arts". The institution that presents itself as a universal gathering of humanity's cultural expressions in fact resembles more a militarized zone for the protection of pavilion-embassies. In this narrative, this art enclave equals the UN, and Baratta's comparison perhaps says more than he intends, because both are places where universalist rhetoric conceals precise power relations.

In this way, the UN metaphor flatters the institution while concealing its exclusions. It presents the Biennale as a universal gathering of humanity's cultural expressions, leaving in the shadows the two-thirds of the world's states that are absent or present only in the marginal spaces of collateral events, not institutionally equivalent and certainly not "on equal terms."

If the UN metaphor has served to present the exhibition as an open and universalist institution, another might be more accurate: not the United Nations, but NATO. Unlike the UN, NATO is explicitly exclusive as membership is conditioned on meeting political, economic, and military criteria determined by existing members. It is a security alliance, not a universal assembly. Its function is not to represent all of humanity but to guarantee the security of those who belong to it against those who do not.

A state's presence in the form of a national pavilion in the gardens, a space in the Arsenale, or outside the official institutional venues, is the result of historical accumulation and diplomatic leverage, not a universal right. The institution offers no formal mechanism through which nations can contest their exclusion or request inclusion. The expansion of national participations has followed the logic of geopolitical alignment: nations that are economic or diplomatic partners of Italy tend to gain access while others remain at the periphery.

The Biennale is a field of national and international geopolitical tension. Any rethinking must begin with a preliminary question: what responsibility does an institution like the Biennale have toward the tensions of power it hosts and feeds? Imagination, as Maria Nadotti said, is productive only if it is rooted in reality. The reality of the Biennale is that it remains one of the most powerful cultural platforms in the world. The question is not whether to use that power, but how — and in whose interest, and with whose voice, and toward what kind of future.