Venice Biennale – let it sink

In 2015 a fishing ship sank in the Mediterranean; over 800 migrants died, locked in the hull of that boat. That boat has now been delivered to this year’s Art Biennale in Venice by artist Christoph Büchel and sits, titled “Barca Nostra” (Our Boat), as a contemporary art object. So ‘edgy’, so ‘provocative’, so ‘challenging’…
This attitude, that nothing is beyond commodification, has clearly now peaked. It is the ultimate exemplar of the decadence, cynicism and moral vacuity of contemporary art-world capitalism; absolutely everything is now spectacle. Enabled and celebrated by the same cultural vanguard that assign value by cost, applaud supposed artistic perspicacity with words of intentional obscurantism and spit on anything they themselves have not permitted into their pantheons.
The head of the Biennale, Paulo Baratta, stated that the wreck, the coffin, the site of human tragedy would be in “a quiet site, sheltered from noise” and be “an invitation to silence and meditation”…