On Wednesday on the Piazza San Marco, a few dozen well-heeled cultural figures in town for the 59th Venice Biennale were whisked into a secret entrance of the Palazzo Ducale and led up to the terrace overlooking perhaps the most famous pigeon-dotted town square on earth. Sneaking onto the terrace, the most serene place in the Most Serene Republic, is usually a big no-no for visitors who make their way into the Ducale, built in the 14th century as the home of the ruling Doges and the seat of power in the Republic of Venice for centuries. And yet guests such as Met director Max Hollein and former Biennale curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev were handed glasses of Ruinart as they stepped onto the overlook where Venice’s bygone rulers would address their subjects.
The occasion? A lunch to honor artist Katharina Grosse, who, while not officially showing in the Biennale, is having a show at Espace Louis Vuitton, a small gallery set on the top floor of the luxury house’s boutique steps away from the Grand Canal.
I inquired with a staffer about how it’s possible to snag a res for 100 at the Doge’s Palace during the busiest art week of the year. She said that oftentimes companies can come by the space if they are nice enough to make donations to the Venetian Heritage Fund.
“They don’t advertise that you can book a place like this,” the woman said, staring down at the tourists on San Marco who were staring up at us with confused faces. “It’s only if you ask.”
This is the influence that the fashion sector has of late in the Queen of the Adriatic during the opening of the Venice Biennale—the every-other-year Olympics of the art world, Oscar week for artists, a 30,000-steps-a-day, five-dinners-a-night bacchanal of culture unseen since the dawn of these pandemic times. That influence has been on the rise in recent editions, as the interplay between the highest tiers of art and fashion has only continued to explode worldwide. (Just some quick, back-of-the-envelope math, for context’s sake: The global marketplace for visual art, including every work sold at auction, privately, or from a gallery, amounted to $65.1 billion last year. LVMH alone eclipsed the entire art market and clocked $69.3 billion in revenue in 2021. The entire luxury market, in 2021, brought in more than $300 billion.) As the Biennale got underway last week, it was clear that the luxury world, and the many serious collectors who inhabit it, are now a fully ensconced force in Venice.
Firstly, there’s the show itself, split into two halves that take place chiefly in two locales, the Arsenale (an armory that was the largest complex in Europe from the 11th century to the Industrial Revolution) and the Giardini (a very nice garden). The first half is the main exhibition curated by the East Village–based High Line Art director Cecilia Alemani, with an artist list that’s more than 90% female, a course correction for a show that chose its first female Italian curator in, you guessed it, 2022. And then there are the national pavilions, where hundreds of countries send envoys to La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia.
It’s no secret that it’s a see-and-be-seen kind of week—actually, it might be the most highbrow-brilliant celeb-spotting environment on planet Earth. Art fair regulars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Paris Hilton may have chosen the Coachella Valley over the Venetian lagoons this go-round, but eagle-eyed observers could still spot Julianne Moore heading to the Palazzo Grassi, Isabelle Huppert strolling through the hallways of the Danieli, Werner Herzog ducking into the Joseph Beuys show at the Palazzo Cini, and Tilda Swinton “masterfully pulling off a baggy fit” while landing at the airport. You know, the crew.
Though the overall mood was celebratory, this being the first Biennale since the global pandemic, there was of course the matter of the land war happening in not-so-far-away Ukraine—Lviv is roughly 800 miles northwest of the city of canals, or about the distance from New York to Chicago. The artists chosen by the Russian government to represent their country in the Giardini pulled out, as did the curator, leaving the stately outpost of the world’s largest country unoccupied, with a single armed guard present to keep protesters from smashing the windows. The Ukrainian pavilion was one of the most celebrated at the Arsenale, as the curators were able to abscond with the as-yet-constructed portions of their installation by car in the opening salvo of attacks. There was even a video appearance by Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy streamed into the Scuola Grande di San Rocco during a black-tie gala benefiting a variety of Ukrainian relief charities, hosted by Peter Brant Jr. and Ivy Getty.
“There have been many years when most people have taken no notice of these fights for freedom,” Zelenskyy said, addressing a room of high rollers sitting underneath paintings by Titian and Tintoretto, before an auction conducted by Simon de Pury. “This is what gives tyrannies hope.”
In Biennale weeks past, Tuesday was the day when members of the accredited television and print art press got first access to the shows so that they could see the exhibitions without the distraction of the crowds. Such preferential treatment confounded the collectors, who are used to the art world favoriting money over all else. When François Pinault entered the Giardini on Tuesday in 2017, the usually press-shy Breton billionaire was surrounded by notebook-toting reporters. It seems the tradition has been slightly altered. On Tuesday this year, reporters were vastly outnumbered by collectors, dealers, advisers, and flacks. In the opening hours, Mitch Rales, the billionaire founder of Potomac, Maryland’s Glenstone museum, was seen strolling through the main pavilion in the Giardini, while Agnes Gund walked toward the national pavilions, Jay Jopling affixed his mask to check out works by Andra Ursuţa and Rosemarie Trockel, and the French pavilion witnessed both Madrid-based collector Patrizia Sandrettto Re Rebaudengo and Sharjah-based collector Hoor Al Qasimi wandering around the meta film-set installations by Zineb Sedira.
And nearby, New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni—a former Biennale curator and the husband of Alemani—walked with his kids and ran into Dakis Joannou, the billionaire Greek collector with an art space on the island of Hydra.
“You remember your uncle Dakis, the Medusa!” Gioni told his children as they scuttled around the Giardini gravel, blissfully unaware of their parents’ involvement in the ever-ongoing mingling of art and capital.
About that! Front and center at the main pavilion was a sign listing its sponsors: the main donor to the Central Pavilion was Christian Dior Couture. The lead sponsor of the U.K. pavilion was Burberry, and the lead sponsor of the Italian pavilion was Valentino. Chanel did not sponsor the French pavilion, but it did throw a dinner Tuesday night that drew more artists than the parties for White Cube, at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, and Hauser & Wirth did the same with Pilar Corrias, at the Palazzetto Pisani. Guests arrived at the Palazzo Zeno, built in the 14th century by a descendant of a Doge who won the naval war in Chioggia between the Venetians and the Genovese, for a meal of risotto and turbot. Among the attendees were the inaugural recipients of the Chanel Next Prize, including Precious Okoyomon, the odds-on favorite to win the Silver Lion, the young-artist award at the Biennale. Swinton was there alongside her daughter, actor Honor Swinton Byrne, as a woman stood nearby wearing a T-shirt asking an intriguing question: “Should I marry Darren Aronofsky?” Kehinde Wiley was also on hand, talking to Mickalene Thomas on FaceTime. (“I can’t even get a cigarette, and I’m Kehinde Wiley,” said Kehinde Wiley.)
The woman behind Chanel’s push into the art world is Yana Peel, the brand’s global head of the arts and the former CEO of the Serpentine Galleries in London. (She resigned in 2019 after it was reported in the press that her husband’s firm had supported a management buyout of NSO, the Israeli cyber-weapons company that created the spyware Pegasus. Peel had no involvement in the operations of NSO or her husband’s firm. In a statement at the time, Peel said, in part, “I welcome debate and discussion about the realities of life in the digital age. There is a place for these debates, but they should be constructive, fair, and factual—not based upon toxic personal attacks.” The Guardian later updated a story about the episode and clarified Peel’s indirect involvement with the firm.) As Peel greeted attendees such as architect Sir David Adjaye and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, I spied a martini bar, where an old man who claimed to have 62 years’ experience stirring gin and vermouth in metal shakers diligently poured the elixir into cupolas.
Standing next to me was a high-up executive at Chanel, and I asked him about the appeal of commingling with the art world.
“Yana is the perfect person for the job,” he said, watching the old man pour the martini into the glass and wash the rim with the peel of an Amalfi Coast lemon. “It’s art, it’s marketing, it’s publicity, and it’s great for the brand.”
On Wednesday, the Louis Vuitton lunch for Katharina Grosse ended after hours of lobster caprese and risotto with candied Sorrento lemon and many glasses of Ruinart blanc de blancs—Ruinart, the world’s oldest Champagne company, has been associated with the founding LVMH brands since the 1960s. Later that evening, there was another dinner hosted by Louis Vuitton, this time at the Ca’ d’Oro on the Grand Canal, built in 1428 for the Contarini family, which first ascended to the Doge’s Palace in 1043.
After many attendees made their way to the Bauer Hotel—both the favored predinner Aperol spritz spot for collectors and the post-dinner party spot for dealers—for a party hosted by David Zwirner on behalf of his artists in the Biennale. Despite a line that snaked down the posh stretch of Salizada San Moise, and the one-in, one-out policy at the door, Oscar Murillo was able to enter with an entourage that pushed a dozen, and a few artists and curators snuck in through a back door. The DJ spun bangers from the Italo disco canon. Smack-dab in the middle of the dance floor was Leon Black, the collector who stepped down as chair of the board at MoMA after reports surfaced of his $158 million in payments to Jeffrey Epstein. (Black has said they were for personal trusts and estate-planning advice and that he deeply regrets becoming involved with Epstein.)
For American arts patrons, the entire week leads up to the biannual cocktail party at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection—thrown by the U.S. Embassy in Italy and the State Department in Washington—that celebrates the artists chosen to represent the U.S. at its pavilion. (It’s the bash that Geoff Dyer famously detailed in his essay “Jeff in Venice,” part of his book of the same name: “There must have been a thousand people stuffed into the garden and hundreds more—the great uninvited—trying to get in. It was as if the government of Venice had fallen and the last helicopters were about to take off from the Guggenheim before the victorious armies of Florence or Rome occupied the city.”) Representing the country this year is Simone Leigh, who rendered the neoclassical columns of the Palladian building unrecognizable by covering the structure with a thatched raffia roof. It was perhaps the first time that images referencing the Cameroon-Togo pavilion at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris went totally, indisputably viral—or at least art-world viral.
“It broke the internet,” Jill Medvedow, the ICA Boston director who cocurated the show, told a crowd that included Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong, artist Rashid Johnson, and former Met director Tom Campbell. “Yes, it really broke the internet.”
But as thronged with hangers-on as the Peggy Guggenheim could be, it was outflanked in art-world firepower by the fashion world, specifically a dinner for the Fondazione Prada, the art concern founded by the brand’s co-CEO and lead designer, Miuccia Prada, along with her business partner and husband, Patrizio Bertelli. Mrs. Prada is the ultimate nexus of the worlds of art and fashion, a billionaire a number of times over who for years cocurated the shows at the Fondazione’s Rem Koolhaas–designed headquarters in Milan alongside Germano Celant, who died in 2020. It’s hard to imagine another luxury titan who would be given the Leo Award from Independent Curators International, as Prada was in 2013.
And despite the hundreds of other dinners dotting the banks of the Grand Canal, the artists all showed up for Mrs. Prada. Anselm Kiefer, who made three-story paintings for the Sala dello Scrutinio in the Palazzo Ducale, an unprecedented installation that covered up the paintings that have been on the walls since the 16th century, held court at one table. Anish Kapoor—whose foundation purchased the Palazzo Manfrin to turn it into a permanent exhibition space and who has a blockbuster show of new work at the Accademia museum—held court at another. Nan Goldin, who has a work in the Biennale after years of activism that helped erase the Sackler name from museum walls, sat with Prada designer Raf Simons, a major collector himself, who would get up from the table on occasion to puff a very slim and chic Vogue cigarette out the window.