Venice's U.S. Pavilion Is $1 Million Short of Getting Its Art Home

The commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale has appealed for donations to ship the pavilion's sculptures home from Italy, telling the New York Times that her nonprofit group faces a shortfall of about $1 million to cover the cost. The paper reported the appeal on Thursday, and its headline placed the works under the banner of the 'Art Olympics', a fair description of how the Biennale's national pavilions are read — as teams entered in a competition. The report does not itemise the costs, only the size of the gap.

Crating, insuring and moving large sculptures across the Atlantic is a separate budget from the one that mounts an exhibition. Many national pavilions are financed by private committees and patrons rather than by a ministry line, and the money for taking a show down is frequently raised late, after the reviews have been written and the collectors have gone home. The New York Times reports that donations are being sought; it does not say what the pavilion does if they do not arrive.

For Venice the episode is a familiar story in miniature. The Biennale is the city's most conspicuous cultural season, filling the Giardini and the Arsenale with national pavilions and drawing critics, curators and collectors across the warmer months, and most of the money that mounts and dismantles it is raised outside the lagoon. The same visitors sustain a rental market that foreign correspondents have for years described as having emptied much of the historic centre of residents.