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).