ARSENALE AND GIARDINI—Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense

As the first American to curate the Venice Biennale's International Exhibition, former Museum of Modern Art curator and current dean of the Yale School of Art Robert Storr [interviewed recently by Art & Auction] has brought a touch of pragmatism to a debate that has occupied contemporary art for the past 30 years. With "Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind" he has set out to demonstrate that a sharp distinction between conceptual art, social critique, and other work generally thought to appeal to the intellect, and work that appeals more immediately to the eyes, ears, and emotions, has become—and may have always been—irrelevant.

Storr's concept allows him to cast a wide net, and his show includes work ranging from painting by Gerhard Richter and Elizabeth Murray to installations by Jason Rhodes and Bruce Nauman, text-based work by Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner, and video by Yang Zhenzhong and Oscar Munoz. Rather than attempting to unify the more than 100 artists in the show under a single thesis, Storr aims to creates a series of smaller connections and disjunctions among individual works—an intermittent connectivity that he hopes ultimately extends from the International Exhibition to the national pavilions.

The subtitle of "Think with the Senses" touches on another organizing principal of the show: capturing the contemporary moment. While some critics have noted that art fairs have become the new biennials—in that they celebrate next-big-thing artists poised for international success—Storr's exhibition moves in a different direction, surveying the contemporary scene by showing recent work by influential older artists (Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly) alongside that of up-and-coming younger artists (26-year-old Emily Prince, for instance), with pride of place given to mid-career artists, who have tended to be overlooked at other international venues in recent years.

As might be expected of an American curator, the show includes many artists currently working in the United States, but its scope is fittingly global with included artists hailing from all over the world. Storr's legacy as curator may in fact be his decisions to include many works dealing with global migration, and to bring new parts of the world into the fold. This year's Biennale inaugurates an African pavilion, around which some controversy has stirred, as well as a Turkish pavilion, among other firsts.