Venice puts on a show
A Taste of Venetian Exhibitions
I don’t know how it happened, but at one point, Her Ladyship somehow managed to get a flea down her shirt while we were aboard a vaporetto. I never thought I’d ever say this about her, but in her efforts to flee the flea, she really rocked the boat! In fact, for a while there I was afraid she was going to do another strip tease like she did that time in France. Thankfully she refrained from making an exhibition of herself in public!
And thankfully, the only exhibitions I saw during our stay in Venice, were, for the most part at least, quite pleasing to the eye. I certainly had no objection to the first one as it entailed a trip, by vaporetto of course, out to St. Giorgio Maggiore Island. Wonderful! Better still, when we arrived, the Oldies made a beeline for the campanile of the Basilica de San Giorgio Maggiore. The panoramic views of the Venetian Lagoon from the top of the bell tower are just phenomenal. I was in no rush to come back down to earth, I can tell you!
My owners are never ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, however, so they soon moved on to nearby Le Stanze del Vetro where the free exhibition ‘Venice and American Studio Glass’ was being held. ‘Here we go again’, I thought, ‘more glass, more of the same.’ Well, this exhibition could not have been more different to the displays we had seen at the Glass Museum in Murano, and what an amazing collection it was! Once again I realised how versatile this incredible material is, and that when it comes to creativity, the sky’s the limit. This glass blowing lark really blows my mind!
On a completely different note, and especially to keep our very own fledgling photographer, His Lordship, happy, we trotted off a couple of days later to the Palazzo Grassi to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition, ‘Le Grand Jeu’, along with the Youssef Nabil exhibition ‘Once Upon a Dream’. I don’t know much about photography and I am happy to leave all that end of things to Himself. Thanks to our visit to the photography museum in Albania, I have learned a little about the technical side of photography, but when it comes to understanding what actually makes a good photograph, I am at a bit of a loss. What I can say about this Cartier-Bresson guy though is that he sure had an eye. He had the amazing ability to capture the perfect moment and the perfect expression.
My favourite by far was the photo on the exhibition poster. The look on that boy’s face … priceless!
Another exhibition that left me at a loss for words – and obviously also the person whose job it was to name it – was ‘Untitled 2020’. Mad stuff altogether! Once again, I was left wondering at what goes on in those human heads of yours. I couldn’t even begin to try to figure out what half the exhibits were about (and I strongly suspect that I wasn’t the only one), but what a wonderful venue the Punta della Dogana is!
This huge redbrick old customs house is stuck out on the tip of Salute, with St. Mark’s Square across the water on one side, St. Giorgio Maggiore across the lagoon on the other, so the views all round are just fantastic. Which is probably just as well… The Wingless Wonders appeared to be quite taken with the exhibition. They certainly spent long enough there!
But for me, although some of the exhibits were, well, interesting, some were just plain weird and some positively scary.
So at times I was quite happy to stare out the windows and take in the beautiful surroundings instead. Whatever you might think about the artworks, it was certainly a memorable outing. In fact, all three exhibitions were memorable in their own ways.
But for my money, Venice itself was the greatest exhibition of all.
