The media response to the fourth edition of Berlin biennale decidedly stresses contact over perception as it is seen to bring "a new art scene to an old city" (Smith 2006). The biennale delineates the increasingly enigmatic nature of contemporary society as it "forms a kind of rebus about the arc and tumult of life itself" (Smith 2006). Resisting "something-for-everyone impulse that plagues so many big shows" (Smith 2006), the Berlin biennial turns away from the academic aesthetics that in a large scale exhibition would indeed lead to an overwhelming emphasis on historical discourse, a bewildering multiplicity of artistic movements, and an incessant interrogation of relevance of artworks. On the contrary, the intensive exploration of the relations between artistic media, genres, and institutions that the Berlin biennial has continued on a larger scale has let to its taking of a spatial turn that has allowed it to stage a "brilliant installation" (Smith 2006) of its works, events, and contexts. In theoretical terms, this process corresponds to the transition from history to topology of art (Groys 2007; Perniola 1995). As the dynamics of circulation of artistis movements, artistic production, and cultural fashions amplifies in scope and scale, the relations between past, present and future become conflated in a space of instant availability (Perniola 1995). Installation, as a spatial aspect of art exhibitions, takes over contemplation as a guiding mode of contemporary experience of art that favors contact, enigma and anti-aesthetics over perception, explanation and beauty.
The critical response to the fourth Berlin biennale refers to its inclination to highlight the "dark, irrational and impermeable" (Thon 2006) side of aesthetic experience. In rejecting a historicist or an over-theoretical organising scheme - the "leitmotif" (Thon 2006) -, contemporary art affirms a transition to "narrative approaches" (Thon 2006). The institutional format of art biennials explores novel theoretial possibilities that release art from the necessity to establish relations with its history. This radical transition from theory to narrative has a corresponding developent in the emphasis that geography of art receives at the expense of history of art. The more widely recognized statement of the Berlin biennale becomes the urban space where it takes place - the building where its main exhibition was installed. The building, concentrating layered memories of Jewish, Communist and post-Soviet past, has "such a strong aura, that all art seems to pale beside it" (Thon 2006). It is the terms of reference of synchronicity and spatiality that organize the experience of contemporary art in terms that are proper to itself as its strives to think itself "selon l'ordre des coexistences, non selon l'ordre des successions" (Perniola 1995).
Contemporary art, exploring the possibility of a topology of art (Perniola 1995), explicitly seeks to avoid a close association with a "hermetic discourse interesting only for an exclusive coterie" (Fanizadeh 2006), as Berlin biennale is reported to attempt. As "everyday life and history in its urban context" (Fanizadeh 2006) has become increasingly central for this beiennial, it has followed a larger trend of the cultural turn of aesthetics that seeks to analyse and consider "les expériences artistiques les plus variées et contradictoires dans leur continuité et dans leurs limites" (Perniola 1995). This approach to art that is sensitive to its interconnections and its urban spaces maps the transitions "from the sublime to the private, from private space into the museum, from the museum to the scrapheap" (Rauterberg 2006) to chart a topology of contemporary art that opens it towards the possibilities of intensified sensation, feeling and thought. As the visitors of the biennial are invited to "gain surprising insights" (Fanizadeh 2006) rather than to consign themselves to the traditional aesthetic experience (Fanizadeh 2006), the anti-aesthetics of modernity of Baudelaire that explores an expanded field of intensified interest (Perniola 1995) corresponds to the intention of the Berlin biennial to adequately represent aesthetic experience in its variety and complexity (Fanizadeh 2006).
Going beyond theoretical discourse, artistic fashions and aesthetic pleasure (Searle 2006), the Berlin biennale is organized around the key reference points of placement, timeliness and journey (Searle 2006). These features of the biennial that emerge from its press reviews, visitor experience and declared mission correspond to the relations "entre lieux et formes, entre régions et langages, entre zones et styles" (Perniola 1995) that the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics makes visible in this case study of Berlin biennial. The Berlin biennale places the emphasis on the "selection of the right works" (Searle 2006), on the "either forgotten, or never seen before" (Searle 2006) artworks, and on the claim to be "not just another biennial" (Searle 2006). Engaged in public discourse on forms, spaces and styles, Berlin biennial, along with other art biennales around the world, "identifie avant tout des identités culturelles particulières, étudie leurs caractéristiques et se préoccupe de leur conservation" (Perniola 1995). From its first edition onwards, Berlin biennale has increased its visitor, institutional and media resonance. Open to urban culture in the multiplicity of its genres, forms and periods, the Berlin biennale has followed a decidedly urban strategy in its changing reflection of contemporary aesthetics that demands "favoriser le développement, promouvoir la circulation, encourager la consommation" (Perniola 1995). Art biennials as a distinctive institutional form of global culture strike urban roots in each city where they take place via responsiveness to the needs of urban development, the velocities of information exchange, and the seductions of cultural consumption.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Berlin Biennale in the Inter-Urban Relations of Cultural Accumulation
The Berlin biennial has evolved in its relation to global culture as it emphasised the inter-urban relations that the event participated in by reorganisation of urban spaces where it took place around thematic platforms, media specificity. public communication, professional collaboration and scholarly discourse. Conceived from the start as a city-oriented event, Berlin biennale, to succeed to take place for the second time in 2001 three years since its inauguration, has shifted its emphasis from the participation of international artists, in 1998 the number of invited artists was 70 as opposed to the group of 50 in 2001, to a wide panel of eighteen international curators that contributed to podium discussions embedded into the schedule of the biennale and printed publications that documented works of and interviews with artists. While the first Berlin biennale sought its place among other international art exhibitions, as its Berlin/Berlin title enters into dialogue with the New York/New York exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the second biennial has developed the relationship between arts festival and scholarly symposium that provided its initial template towards merger between the two around conceptual focal points that organised the relations between artists, curators and the public within each urban location.
As Perniola (2007) points out, the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics cannot avoid its philosophical reconsideration since the relations between culture and society differ from place to place and from time to time. That Berlin biennale had to reorganize itself around thematic platforms, as it made efforts to ensure that its second edition takes place, points to the necessity to bring a philosophical discussion to bear on the aesthetic representation of global culture. Rather than being borne of homogeneity, global culture is made of areas of heterogeneity that in their spatial organization establish variously durable connections between space and culture. Thus, the second Berlin biennial was following in the steps of the spatialization of the relations between aesthetics, society and culture as it put the topics of corporate art, curatorial business, recycling of the conceptual, post national, and digital verite into the center-stage of its theoretical reflection. This embedding of theory and philosophy into the operational structure of art biennials, as Berlin biennale shows, becomes necessary since "from the moment we attribute a decisive importance to the self-reflection of societies, even the presumed unity of the Western point of view breaks down in a multiplicity of different perspectives" (Perniola 2007: 39-43).
While the first Berlin biennial seems to follow the principle of aesthetic disinterestedness, as it remains restated in art reviews (Plagens 2009), the second biennale opens up towards what Perniola calls Baudelaire's "anti-aesthetic orientation" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). Baudelaire's prose works prefigure the sociological theorization of "important phenomena of modernity such as fashion, the city, material life, drugs, prostitution, conflict, and exoticism" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). Already proposing the terms of connectedness, contribution and commitment as keywords for its second edition, the third Berlin biennale explicitly organizes its artwork exhibitions around the thematic hubs that deal with migration, urban conditions, sonic landscapes, fashions and scenes and another cinema. This approach to art and culture that art biennials spearhead follows in the steps of the revolt against aesthetic disinterestedness and academic aesthetics of the European enlightenment, such as it is represented in Kant's position on aesthetic judgment as divorced from any practical interest or purpose par excellance. This anti-aesthetics of Baudelaire, moreover, rather than ruling out any connection to interest and desire lays an explicit emphasis "on the intensity of feeling and on the splendor of what presents itself to the imagination" (Perniola 2007: 43-46).
Indeed, Berlin biennale appeals to an ever wider range of cultural, professional, governmental, institutional and aesthetic interests each time it takes place. If the first biennial cuts across art, architecture, design, literature, music, choreography, fashion, film and theatre in its effort to establish itself as an interdisciplinary forum, the second biennial expands the focus of its operation towards translation between art and culture that renders life into an object of insatiable interest. This transition from interdisciplinary abstraction towards intensification of interest is accomplished by stressing the relationship of Berlin biennale to its visitors, viewers, organizers and critics. In the second biennial, films, videos and installations that aim at interaction with the public receive special emphasis in its exhibition program. Cinema screenings are paired with podium discussions with international curators that cover topics of professional and general interest. An orientation towards public interest supplies an institutional framework for Berlin beinnale as it is measured, documented and staged. Beginning in 1998 for each biennial show, attendance numbers are measured, local, national and international media coverage is documented, and prominent urban locations for the majority of the biennial exhibitions are chosen.
In its opposition to academic aesthetics, Berlin biennale puts into practice the defining characteristics of anti-aesthetics that consist in "rejection of conventionality, openness to extra-European cultures and attention to alternative and even pathological experiences" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). This anti-aesthetics performs cultural turn as it intensifies the relations between art and society in the form of the surplus of interest that is invested by aesthetic imagination into the world and by society into art via financial, affective and symbolic expenditure. Save for the first biennial with higher than average attendance numbers based on its editions for which comprehensive data are available, Berlin biennale has registered an unchanged number of visitors of its second and third instances. As a transition from the same to the same in Perniola's terms, the repetition of Berlin biennale produces the radical difference of "emotional over-investment" (Perniola 2007: 46-49) that indicates a more general social transition towards a culture of performance that is "not directed toward the fulfillment of pleasure but toward the preservation of excitement" (Perniola 2007: 46-49). Thus, art biennials become quintessential sites of cultural accumulation as an addictive transition from the same to the same that in the contemporary society of the spectacle performatively "constitute a global alternative that, however, is not programmatic but factual" (Perniola 2007: 49-51).
As Perniola (2007) points out, the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics cannot avoid its philosophical reconsideration since the relations between culture and society differ from place to place and from time to time. That Berlin biennale had to reorganize itself around thematic platforms, as it made efforts to ensure that its second edition takes place, points to the necessity to bring a philosophical discussion to bear on the aesthetic representation of global culture. Rather than being borne of homogeneity, global culture is made of areas of heterogeneity that in their spatial organization establish variously durable connections between space and culture. Thus, the second Berlin biennial was following in the steps of the spatialization of the relations between aesthetics, society and culture as it put the topics of corporate art, curatorial business, recycling of the conceptual, post national, and digital verite into the center-stage of its theoretical reflection. This embedding of theory and philosophy into the operational structure of art biennials, as Berlin biennale shows, becomes necessary since "from the moment we attribute a decisive importance to the self-reflection of societies, even the presumed unity of the Western point of view breaks down in a multiplicity of different perspectives" (Perniola 2007: 39-43).
While the first Berlin biennial seems to follow the principle of aesthetic disinterestedness, as it remains restated in art reviews (Plagens 2009), the second biennale opens up towards what Perniola calls Baudelaire's "anti-aesthetic orientation" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). Baudelaire's prose works prefigure the sociological theorization of "important phenomena of modernity such as fashion, the city, material life, drugs, prostitution, conflict, and exoticism" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). Already proposing the terms of connectedness, contribution and commitment as keywords for its second edition, the third Berlin biennale explicitly organizes its artwork exhibitions around the thematic hubs that deal with migration, urban conditions, sonic landscapes, fashions and scenes and another cinema. This approach to art and culture that art biennials spearhead follows in the steps of the revolt against aesthetic disinterestedness and academic aesthetics of the European enlightenment, such as it is represented in Kant's position on aesthetic judgment as divorced from any practical interest or purpose par excellance. This anti-aesthetics of Baudelaire, moreover, rather than ruling out any connection to interest and desire lays an explicit emphasis "on the intensity of feeling and on the splendor of what presents itself to the imagination" (Perniola 2007: 43-46).
Indeed, Berlin biennale appeals to an ever wider range of cultural, professional, governmental, institutional and aesthetic interests each time it takes place. If the first biennial cuts across art, architecture, design, literature, music, choreography, fashion, film and theatre in its effort to establish itself as an interdisciplinary forum, the second biennial expands the focus of its operation towards translation between art and culture that renders life into an object of insatiable interest. This transition from interdisciplinary abstraction towards intensification of interest is accomplished by stressing the relationship of Berlin biennale to its visitors, viewers, organizers and critics. In the second biennial, films, videos and installations that aim at interaction with the public receive special emphasis in its exhibition program. Cinema screenings are paired with podium discussions with international curators that cover topics of professional and general interest. An orientation towards public interest supplies an institutional framework for Berlin beinnale as it is measured, documented and staged. Beginning in 1998 for each biennial show, attendance numbers are measured, local, national and international media coverage is documented, and prominent urban locations for the majority of the biennial exhibitions are chosen.
In its opposition to academic aesthetics, Berlin biennale puts into practice the defining characteristics of anti-aesthetics that consist in "rejection of conventionality, openness to extra-European cultures and attention to alternative and even pathological experiences" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). This anti-aesthetics performs cultural turn as it intensifies the relations between art and society in the form of the surplus of interest that is invested by aesthetic imagination into the world and by society into art via financial, affective and symbolic expenditure. Save for the first biennial with higher than average attendance numbers based on its editions for which comprehensive data are available, Berlin biennale has registered an unchanged number of visitors of its second and third instances. As a transition from the same to the same in Perniola's terms, the repetition of Berlin biennale produces the radical difference of "emotional over-investment" (Perniola 2007: 46-49) that indicates a more general social transition towards a culture of performance that is "not directed toward the fulfillment of pleasure but toward the preservation of excitement" (Perniola 2007: 46-49). Thus, art biennials become quintessential sites of cultural accumulation as an addictive transition from the same to the same that in the contemporary society of the spectacle performatively "constitute a global alternative that, however, is not programmatic but factual" (Perniola 2007: 49-51).
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Urban Space and Global Culture in Art Focus Jerusalem
The trajectory of development of Art Focus Jerusalem to its present format from its inception in 1994 as an Israel-wide event to a city-oriented international exhibition shows a connection between urban space and global culture that became closer over the years. As a review of its third installation in 1999 indicates (Vine 2000), the first Art Focus did not have international artists take part in its show and it took place across a bewildering array of spaces across Israel. In 1996, international artists become invited to Art Focus 2 that became primarily restricted to Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, while the next installation of Art Focus have become exclusively associated with Jerusalem that in 1999 hosted 95 Israeli and 25 international artists across the five venues of the Sultan's Pool, the Teddy Kolleck Stadium, the Israel Museum, the Bezalel Academy of Arts, and Ticho House. In its aesthetics the event that in 1999 made a claim to find a place among the burgeouning circuit of international art biennials exhibits both a cultural and an urban turn. Art Focus Jerusalem joins within a single network of spaces both Israeli independent and internationally established institutions, those that experienced international exposure and beginning artists only entering into media limelight, and site specific and local artworks and representative objects and travelling exhibits of global artists. The event critically engages the open space across the walls of the Old City, the intersticial space of leisure and entertainment of the sports complex, the gallery space of classical and contemporary art exhibitions of the museum, the studio exhibit halls of the graduating art students' show, and the alternative spaces of out-of-the-way museum locations, auction houses and commercial galleries (Vine 2000).
This transformation of Art Focus Jerusalem into an event that takes place on the cross-section of urban space and global culture has its parallel in the cultural turn in aesthetics as it became progressively divorced from philosophy (Perniola 2007). Perniola notes that as early as a decade ago aesthetics has widened its disciplinary reach to the widest possible extent that bridges across multiple domains by creative interchange of codes (Kelley 1998). As the "gap between aesthetic knowledge and contemporary society" (Perniola 2007: 39-43) closes, the emerging articulation of contemporary aesthetics opens up "an epistemological horizon characterized by flexibility" (Perniola 2007: 39-43) that in case of art biennials takes the form of the aesthetic principle that makes "the distant appear near and the near distant" (Perniola 2007: 39-43). International art biennials bring urban space, as a multidisciplinary subject of knowledge, into immediate contact with global culture, as a carrier of aesthetic knowledge. It is the margins and boundaries of contemporary aesthetics that art biennials explore while becoming increasingly relevant to cities where they take place. In Benjamin's terms it is the "sex appeal of the inorganic" that art exercises as it attracts the millions of visitors that visit art museums, fairs and biennials (Plagens 2009). It is not aesthetic knowledge or appreciation of art that brings mass attendance to art events internationally, as the time-span of viewing that artworks can statistically expect from an average visitor viewer fits the pace of walking rather than of studied contemplation, but the relations between space and pleasure in which art participates. As it becomes more important for cities to be attractive, to investors, tourists, and professionals, the nexus between urban space and aesthetic pleasure becomes one of the key factors in the globally increasing prominence of art biennials.
The relations between art and society rest as much upon their theoretical discussion as upon the institutional structures that carry them. The relations between modernity and art, since their discussion by Baudelaire, occur on the background of rapidly growing cities that in their linear transition towards modern metropolises become scenes of radical difference that the aesthetic gaze of modern art documents both in its subject matter and in its aesthetic representation. In this respect, the modern period appears to be one long transition from the same to the same with only rare moments of radical difference that puncture the narrative of modern history. As representation, in its aesthetic, scientific or literary form, approaches in its understanding the status of a simulacrum, as the relations between represented original and representational copy enter into circuits of scrutiny, criticism and contestation, representation can no longer pretend to be a straightforward copy of an original. Instead, it becomes a playful simulacrum that as a copy let loose from the foundational ties to an original becomes not so much hyperreal, as Baudrillard's nostalgia for the good original of reality would suggest, but appealing and pleasant, as Perniola's discussion of the sex appeal of the inorganic suggests.
The perfection of the simulacrum on its linear trajectory of its growth in intensity of similitude to its original - as Shanghai's skyline takes over that of New York both in its present execution and in its projected future - dissolves the hierarchy between the copy and the original. As it is no longer possible to be true to the original, the copy, in its theoretical status, becomes interchangeable with the original. Nostalgia for reality interchanges with the fascination with simulacrum. The aesthetic gaze charges with the sex appeal of the inorganic the artistic simulacra that cities, in the process of their aestheticization, turn themselves into. Art biennials become occassions not so much for seeing art as for seeing cities as aesthetic copies of themselves that stand ever closer to reality. The transition from the same to the same of cities marks philosophically their becoming simulacra, as in art biennials the difference between cities celebrating art and art celebrating cities disappears. The radical difference of contemporary art is this cultural turn of the aesthetics that follows not so much from the internal development of art theory but from the contemporary transformation of social reality. As art meets reality and theory meets society within the environment of playful interchange of codes, as the theories of postmodernism (Baudrillard; Jameson), poststucturalism (Deleuze and Guattari; de Landa) and postmodernity (Bauman; Harvey) have historically indicated, simulacrum becomes not a negative category of analysis that would point out to a lack but a positive term of reference that stands for excess.
Art museums, having stock presence on the urban topography of art biennials, with collections in excess of their exhibition capacity, with artworks on display in excess of one-day overview, and with event calendars in excess of individual time budgets are transformed into simulacra of themselves that develop strategies for urban, media, and global presence that dissolve the difference between their real condition and represented status. While global art museums, such as Guggenheim Museum make a transition from artworks to cities in order to become as institutional simulacra extremely attractive objects of investment, globalizing metropolitan centers make a transition in the opposite direction from cities to artworks in order to turn themselves into urban simulacra that irresistibly attract investment flows of desire, money and interest. As focal points of emotional, financial, and social investment, increasingly cities seek to intensify their hold on individual and collective attention that becomes aesthetic, sexualized and abstract as it becomes stronger. Detaching themselves from any straightforward relation to the circuits of either use value or exchange value, cities become simulacra that acquire fetish value that melts together their materiality and abstraction. Art biennials are material abstractions and abstract materials of this twofold process of investing urban space with aesthetic pleasure. In the age of urban repoducibility, art biennials lend to cities their aura of Benjamin's sex appeal of the inorganic through precisely what Perniola calls making "the distant appear near and the near distant" (Perniola 2007: 39-43), since this is how Benjamin defines the experience of aura in his essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproduction, as its famous English translation has it.
This transformation of Art Focus Jerusalem into an event that takes place on the cross-section of urban space and global culture has its parallel in the cultural turn in aesthetics as it became progressively divorced from philosophy (Perniola 2007). Perniola notes that as early as a decade ago aesthetics has widened its disciplinary reach to the widest possible extent that bridges across multiple domains by creative interchange of codes (Kelley 1998). As the "gap between aesthetic knowledge and contemporary society" (Perniola 2007: 39-43) closes, the emerging articulation of contemporary aesthetics opens up "an epistemological horizon characterized by flexibility" (Perniola 2007: 39-43) that in case of art biennials takes the form of the aesthetic principle that makes "the distant appear near and the near distant" (Perniola 2007: 39-43). International art biennials bring urban space, as a multidisciplinary subject of knowledge, into immediate contact with global culture, as a carrier of aesthetic knowledge. It is the margins and boundaries of contemporary aesthetics that art biennials explore while becoming increasingly relevant to cities where they take place. In Benjamin's terms it is the "sex appeal of the inorganic" that art exercises as it attracts the millions of visitors that visit art museums, fairs and biennials (Plagens 2009). It is not aesthetic knowledge or appreciation of art that brings mass attendance to art events internationally, as the time-span of viewing that artworks can statistically expect from an average visitor viewer fits the pace of walking rather than of studied contemplation, but the relations between space and pleasure in which art participates. As it becomes more important for cities to be attractive, to investors, tourists, and professionals, the nexus between urban space and aesthetic pleasure becomes one of the key factors in the globally increasing prominence of art biennials.
The relations between art and society rest as much upon their theoretical discussion as upon the institutional structures that carry them. The relations between modernity and art, since their discussion by Baudelaire, occur on the background of rapidly growing cities that in their linear transition towards modern metropolises become scenes of radical difference that the aesthetic gaze of modern art documents both in its subject matter and in its aesthetic representation. In this respect, the modern period appears to be one long transition from the same to the same with only rare moments of radical difference that puncture the narrative of modern history. As representation, in its aesthetic, scientific or literary form, approaches in its understanding the status of a simulacrum, as the relations between represented original and representational copy enter into circuits of scrutiny, criticism and contestation, representation can no longer pretend to be a straightforward copy of an original. Instead, it becomes a playful simulacrum that as a copy let loose from the foundational ties to an original becomes not so much hyperreal, as Baudrillard's nostalgia for the good original of reality would suggest, but appealing and pleasant, as Perniola's discussion of the sex appeal of the inorganic suggests.
The perfection of the simulacrum on its linear trajectory of its growth in intensity of similitude to its original - as Shanghai's skyline takes over that of New York both in its present execution and in its projected future - dissolves the hierarchy between the copy and the original. As it is no longer possible to be true to the original, the copy, in its theoretical status, becomes interchangeable with the original. Nostalgia for reality interchanges with the fascination with simulacrum. The aesthetic gaze charges with the sex appeal of the inorganic the artistic simulacra that cities, in the process of their aestheticization, turn themselves into. Art biennials become occassions not so much for seeing art as for seeing cities as aesthetic copies of themselves that stand ever closer to reality. The transition from the same to the same of cities marks philosophically their becoming simulacra, as in art biennials the difference between cities celebrating art and art celebrating cities disappears. The radical difference of contemporary art is this cultural turn of the aesthetics that follows not so much from the internal development of art theory but from the contemporary transformation of social reality. As art meets reality and theory meets society within the environment of playful interchange of codes, as the theories of postmodernism (Baudrillard; Jameson), poststucturalism (Deleuze and Guattari; de Landa) and postmodernity (Bauman; Harvey) have historically indicated, simulacrum becomes not a negative category of analysis that would point out to a lack but a positive term of reference that stands for excess.
Art museums, having stock presence on the urban topography of art biennials, with collections in excess of their exhibition capacity, with artworks on display in excess of one-day overview, and with event calendars in excess of individual time budgets are transformed into simulacra of themselves that develop strategies for urban, media, and global presence that dissolve the difference between their real condition and represented status. While global art museums, such as Guggenheim Museum make a transition from artworks to cities in order to become as institutional simulacra extremely attractive objects of investment, globalizing metropolitan centers make a transition in the opposite direction from cities to artworks in order to turn themselves into urban simulacra that irresistibly attract investment flows of desire, money and interest. As focal points of emotional, financial, and social investment, increasingly cities seek to intensify their hold on individual and collective attention that becomes aesthetic, sexualized and abstract as it becomes stronger. Detaching themselves from any straightforward relation to the circuits of either use value or exchange value, cities become simulacra that acquire fetish value that melts together their materiality and abstraction. Art biennials are material abstractions and abstract materials of this twofold process of investing urban space with aesthetic pleasure. In the age of urban repoducibility, art biennials lend to cities their aura of Benjamin's sex appeal of the inorganic through precisely what Perniola calls making "the distant appear near and the near distant" (Perniola 2007: 39-43), since this is how Benjamin defines the experience of aura in his essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproduction, as its famous English translation has it.
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