Page 16 - La Biennale di Venezia issue of World of Art Magazine
P. 16
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
58TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION
RALPH RUGOFF. CURATOR
OF LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA.
COURTESY OF LA BIENNALE
DI VENEZIA. PHOTO BY
ANDREA AVEZZU.
Statement by Ralph Rugoff
Curator of the 58th International Art Exhibition
May You Live In Interesting Times
In a speech given in the late 1930s, British MP Sir Austen Chamberlain invoked an
ancient Chinese curse that he had learned of from a British diplomat who had served
in Asia, and which took the curious form of saying, “May you live in interesting times.”
“There is no doubt that the curse has fallen on us,” Chamberlain observed. “We move
from one crisis to another. We suffer one disturbance and shock after another.”
This summary sounds uncannily familiar today as the news cycle spins from crisis to
crisis. Yet at a moment when the digital dissemination of fake news and “alternative
facts” is corroding political discourse and the trust on which it depends, it is worth
pausing whenever possible to reassess our terms of reference. In this case it turns
out that there never was any such “ancient Chinese curse,” despite the fact that
Western politicians have made reference to it in speeches for over a hundred years.
It is an ersatz cultural relic, and yet for all its fictional status it has had real rhetorical
effects in significant public exchanges. At once suspect and rich in meaning, this kind
of uncertain artefact suggests potential lines of exploration that are worth pursuing
at present, especially when the “interesting times” it evokes seem to be with us once
again. Hence the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia will be
titled after a counterfeit curse.
16 WORLD of ART
