America's Venice Pavilion Needs Help Getting Its Sculptures Home

The commissioner of the United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale has said that donations are badly needed to ship the pavilion's sculptures home from Italy, with her nonprofit organisation facing a $1 million shortfall to cover the costs, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

The Biennale is the exhibition American newspapers like to call the art world's Olympics, and the comparison holds at the loading bay as firmly as in the galleries. A national pavilion is a temporary embassy: raised, filled, staffed, guarded and advertised for a season, then taken down. The taking down is the part no visitor sees, and it is the visiting country, not the host city, that pays for it.

Venice supplies the stage and the setting. The cost of arriving, and the cost of leaving, fall to the countries that come — a division of labour the city has lived on since the exhibition began in the 1890s.