The 60th Venice Biennale closed its doors in November 2024, having welcomed over 700,000 visitors to experience "Foreigners Everywhere." Meanwhile, cities from Riga to Rabat are planning their own editions, each promising to capture something essential about our contemporary moment. The global biennale circuit now includes over 300 recurring exhibitions. The question presents itself with increasing urgency: what purpose do these sprawling art festivals serve, and who exactly are they serving?

The machinery is staggering. Venice alone employs over 1,500 people during its seven-month run, with a budget exceeding €65 million. São Paulo transforms 25,000 square meters of Oscar Niemeyer's modernist pavilion every two years. The documenta fifteen scandal cost Kassel not just money but institutional credibility that may take decades to rebuild. These are not minor cultural events but major civic investments that reshape cities, careers, and conversations.

The Market's Gilded Cage

"The biennale has become a shopping mall with a better class of consumer," observed critic Holland Cotter after Venice 2022. The transformation is undeniable. What began as spaces for aesthetic experimentation have evolved into complex ecosystems where cultural capital converts seamlessly to actual capital. Collectors now schedule their years around the biennale calendar—Venice in spring, Istanbul in autumn, with art fairs conveniently attached like luxury remoras.

The numbers tell their own story. When Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie showed at Venice in 2015, his auction prices jumped 400% within eighteen months. A placement in the Whitney Biennial can transform an emerging artist's gallery representation overnight. The Korean pavilion at Venice has become such a career catalyst that artists speak of "before Venice" and "after Venice" as distinct phases of their professional lives.

Yet this economic reality, however dominant, doesn't fully explain the biennale's persistence. Markets could function perfectly well through galleries and fairs alone—indeed, they largely do. The biennale serves different purposes, older and stranger than commerce, though commerce has learned to speak its language fluently.

The Democracy of Exhaustion

Consider what actually happens at a biennale. The Arsenale stretches for nearly a kilometer, housing hundreds of works that range from the transcendent to the incomprehensible. By noon, even seasoned critics develop what Germans call "Ausstellungsmüdigkeit"—exhibition fatigue. The national pavilions scatter across the Giardini like aesthetic nation-states, each claiming urgent relevance. The collateral events multiply beyond any person's capacity to experience them.

This exhaustion isn't a bug but a feature. As curator Okwui Enwezor argued before his death in 2019, "The biennale's impossibility is its point. No one can see everything, understand everything, judge everything. This forces a kind of humility that the art world desperately needs."

The overwhelm serves a democratic function, paradoxically. The billionaire collector and the art student on a gap year find themselves equally lost, equally dependent on chance encounters and unexpected discoveries. In an attention economy where algorithms increasingly determine what culture reaches us, the biennale remains gloriously inefficient—a space where you might stumble into exactly what you weren't looking for.

Political Theater, Actual Politics

The 2024 Venice Biennale opened three weeks before the European Parliament elections that saw far-right parties gain unprecedented power. The timing wasn't coincidental. Curator Adriano Pedrosa's theme of "Foreigners Everywhere" explicitly engaged with questions of belonging, displacement, and identity that would define the electoral campaign. The Golden Lion went to Mataaho Collective, four Māori women whose massive textile installation transformed the New Zealand pavilion into what one critic called "a breathing lung of indigenous knowledge."

This is what biennales do that commercial galleries cannot: they create spaces where aesthetic experience and political urgency occupy the same room, demanding negotiation. When the Australian pavilion presents Archie Moore's massive family tree tracking Indigenous ancestry alongside colonial violence, it's not merely representing history—it's intervening in contemporary debates about sovereignty and recognition.

The contradictions multiply endlessly. The Danish pavilion critiques extraction capitalism while being renovated with mining fortune money. The sustainability-themed Dutch entry required shipping 40 tons of recycled materials across Europe. These ironies aren't hidden but highlighted, becoming part of the work's meaning.

The Koyo Kouoh Principle

When Koyo Kouoh was announced as curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale—the first African woman to hold the position—she introduced a radical proposition: "In Minor Keys." Her vision, crystallized in conversations before her unexpected death in May 2025, challenged the biennale's tendency toward spectacular statement.

Her approach suggests a different model for how biennales might function. Not as megaphones for already-loud voices, but as amplifiers for frequencies typically below the threshold of market attention. The 2026 edition, being realized by her curatorial team posthumously, promises to test whether such subtle recalibration is possible within the biennale's inherently spectacular framework.

The Necessity of Excess

Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine's Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, offered this provocation: "Biennales are like democracy—the worst form of exhibition except for all the others." His point captures something essential. These exhibitions are inefficient, expensive, exhausting, often pretentious, frequently compromised. They're also irreplaceable.

Where else does contemporary art command entire cities' attention? Where else do governments that routinely defund culture suddenly invest millions in temporary exhibitions? Where else do diverse global practices occupy the same conceptual space, forcing conversations that wouldn't otherwise occur?

The curator and writer Legacy Russell argues that biennales serve as "temporary autonomous zones"—spaces where different rules apply, where value isn't only monetary, where success isn't only quantifiable.

Beauty as Resistance

Here the conversation must acknowledge what discourse often avoids: people hunger for beauty. Not prettiness—beauty. The kind that reorganizes perception, that makes time dilate, that reminds us why humans have always made seemingly useless things despite urgent practical demands.

The Lithuanian pavilion at Venice 2019—a beach, complete with sand and sun-mimicking lights, where visitors could lie in swimsuits and sing—wasn't escapist. It was utopian in Ernst Bloch's sense: not a nowhere but a not-yet, a glimpse of different possible arrangements of life and pleasure. When Simone Leigh's monumental sculpture dominated the American pavilion in 2022, its formal power didn't diminish but amplified its political charge.

This is what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls "the distribution of the sensible"—how aesthetic experience reorganizes what can be seen, said, and imagined. The best biennale works operate on this level, creating new sensory possibilities that make new political possibilities thinkable.

The São Paulo Model

While Venice maintains its position through historical inertia and spectacular location, the Bienal de São Paulo suggests alternative futures. Free admission ensures genuine public access. The educational program—which engages over 800,000 students—treats aesthetic education as democratic infrastructure. The emphasis on Global South dialogues creates conversations that bypass traditional art world power centers.

Digital Disruption, Physical Insistence

The pandemic forced a reckoning. Virtual viewing rooms, online catalogs, and livestreamed tours proved that much of what biennales do can be digitized. Yet attendance at physical exhibitions has surged beyond pre-pandemic levels. Venice 2024 saw its highest attendance ever. Why?

Because certain experiences resist digitization. The scale of El Anatsui's bottle-cap tapestries, the durational unfolding of Christian Marclay's "The Clock," the physical disorientation of entering James Turrell's light installations—these require bodily presence. As artist Hito Steyerl observes, "The more our lives become screens, the more we need spaces that insist on our physical presence."

Infrastructure as Destiny

The architecture of biennales matters more than most discussions acknowledge. Venice's national pavilions—built between 1907 and 1995—physically encode geopolitical hierarchies. Germany's fascist-era pavilion, renovated but never fully exorcised of its history, hosts different conversations than Korea's sleek 1995 addition. The Arsenale's industrial sublime creates different possibilities than white cube galleries.

Newer biennales must work with what exists. The Liverpool Biennial transforms defunct warehouses and empty shops, making economic decline part of its aesthetic vocabulary. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India operates across heritage buildings, public spaces, and improvised venues, creating what founder Bose Krishnamachari calls "a people's biennale."

These spatial constraints become productive. They force encounters between contemporary art and historical architecture, between international ambitions and local realities, between ideal exhibition conditions and actual circumstances.

The Curatorial Question

The role of the biennale curator has evolved from organizer to oracle, expected to synthesize global contemporary practice into coherent narrative. This impossible task produces some of the art world's most interesting thinking and some of its most pretentious prose.

Consider Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's documenta 13 (2012), which included strawberry plants, quantum physics lectures, and a satellite exhibition in Kabul. Or Massimiliano Gioni's Venice 2013, "The Encyclopedic Palace," which juxtaposed outsider art with blue-chip contemporary work. These sprawling, inclusive approaches suggest that curation itself might be understood as artistic practice—not selection but composition.

Yet younger curators increasingly resist the grand narrative model. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, directing the 2025 São Paulo Biennial, describes his approach as "careful listening rather than loud pronouncement." This shift from curatorial authority to curatorial facilitation might point toward more sustainable models.

Money Talks

The economics are unavoidable. The Venice Biennale generates approximately €200 million in economic impact for the city. Art Basel's attachment to Venice has transformed the opening week into what one dealer called "the most expensive party on Earth." Corporate sponsors—from luxury brands to tech companies—compete for association with cultural prestige.

But alternative models persist. The Gwangju Biennale emerged from South Korea's democracy movement, maintaining a commitment to political art despite market pressures. The Havana Biennial, operating on a fraction of Venice's budget, has become the most important platform for Latin American and Caribbean artists through curatorial vision rather than financial power.

These examples suggest that while money shapes biennales, it doesn't fully determine them.

Future Tense

The next decade will test whether biennales can evolve beyond their current contradictions. Climate crisis makes the carbon footprint of flying art and people globally increasingly untenable. Political polarization threatens the international cooperation these exhibitions require. Market speculation has distorted artistic value beyond recognition.

Yet new models emerge. The Bangkok Art Biennale emphasizes regional rather than global circulation. The Desert X biennial creates site-specific works that can't be commodified or moved. The Toronto Biennial embeds itself in communities for years before opening, creating relationships rather than just exhibitions.

The Wager

Biennales persist because they serve functions that nothing else quite manages. They create temporary cities within cities where different rules apply. They force encounters between practices that would otherwise never meet. They make art briefly matter to people and institutions that usually ignore it.

Most importantly, they maintain space for art's most essential quality: its ability to reorganize perception in ways that make different futures imaginable. In a moment when political imagination seems exhausted, when climate catastrophe approaches, when inequality accelerates, this function becomes not less but more necessary.

The question isn't whether we need biennales but whether we can make them what we need them to be. Not trade fairs or tourist attractions, though they'll always be partly those things, but genuine experiments in what collective meaning-making might look like. Spaces where beauty and criticality, pleasure and politics, local knowledge and global circulation can coexist productively.

Because the alternative—surrendering cultural space entirely to market logic and algorithmic sorting—represents a kind of spiritual defeat from which recovery might prove impossible.

The biennale, for all its contradictions, keeps alive the possibility that art might still matter in ways that exceed commerce, that beauty might still serve resistance, that gathering in physical space to share aesthetic experience might still be essential to whatever we might become.

That's not everything. But in our current moment, it might be enough.