Inside the 2024 Venice Biennale: Papal Pavilions, a Polarizing Program, and Billionaires Aplenty

On Saturday, a full week before the public opening of the Venice Biennale, the Lebanese retail magnate Tony Salamé was in Rome to open a new show of work from his sprawling contemporary art collection at the Palazzo Barberini, the birthplace of the baroque. It has one staircase by Bernini, one staircase by Borromini, and is the home of Triumph of Divine Providence, a massive fresco by Pietro da Cortona that was commissioned by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini—after he was elected pontiff and became Pope Urban VIII. It has 187 rooms and sprawls out over nearly 130,000 square feet of prime Roman real estate.

“Even if this show sucks, it won’t, because of the space,” said Massimilliano Gioni, the artistic director of the New Museum, who cocurated the show and has worked with Salamé for years.

We were at lunch in Rome before the grand opening. Salamé ordered for the table without a menu, hours before the show—which in due time we would see does not suck.

“This is the first time I’ve been clean-shaven since COVID,” Salamé said. “And I think it’s the first time I’ve worn a suit too.”

Though born in Beirut, Salamé built his fashion empire by going back and forth to Italy and bringing the latest collections to his multibrand store Aïshti, delivering designer looks to Lebanese consumers with fresh purchasing power in a post–civil war society. Flush with cash, he expanded Aïshti into an empire and started collecting art with help from his adviser, Jeffrey Deitch. The Aïshti Foundation has a private museum in Beirut, and Salamé often has Gioni curate shows from his collections off-site. With the whole art world heading to Venice in the middle of April, Salamé hoped the artists in his collection, and their gallery owners, might be down to stop by the Eternal City on the way.

“Once again, all roads lead to Rome, sempre e sempre,” said Hans Ulrich Obrist, when I encountered him at the opening. Not only had people shown up for Salamé’s show, it was probably the biggest contemporary art shindig in the cradle of Western civiliazion since the opening of MAXXI in 2010. Inside the Palazzo Barberini, Laura Owens, Henry Taylor, and Wade Guyton had replaced the permanent hang of Carravagio and El Greco and Raphael, with a gigantic sculpture by Charles Ray installed in a rotunda upstairs.

The dinner venue was another not-so-subtle display of soft power: It was to be held at the Villa Medici, the 16th-century palace built for a family synonymous with riches, plopped on the top of the Pincio, the tallest point in the City of Seven Hills. Napoleon bought it in 1803 to house the French Academy, where Gallic artists could come to the belly of antiquity and copy the designs of the ancients. So that meant Salamé had to haggle with the French over how many people he could invite to dinner. Initially they capped it at 150, Salmé said, but after he offered a donation, they settled on 250.

“I have a lot of friends,” he shrugged.

Golf carts shuttled those lucky guests up the hill and unleashed a vision of the city—the Colosseum, the golden top of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Vatican City—and dropped them off at the portico of the Villa Medici, past the facade with interventions by Michelangelo. Salamé is a voracious collector who buys artists in depth from galleries all over the world, but for one night the cutthroat competitors lived in harmony. “After all this, the art world, it’s a big family,” said Lower East Side dealer Rachel Uffner. She was joined by fellow New York gallery owner-operators, such as Andrew Kreps, Anton Kern, Karma’s Brendan Dugan, Friedrich Petzel, Carol Greene, Stefania Bortolami, Lawrence Lurhing, and senior directors at Gagosian and David Zwiner. From Europe came Massimo de Carlo, Eva Presenhuber, Pilar Corrias, Max Hetzler, and Xavier Hufkens.

“There are more dealers here than at Art Basel,” Gioni cracked in his toast. There were artists too, including Nate Lowman, Josh Smith, and Maurizio Cattelan, who wore a T-shirt that said “Yes Bruce Nauman.” And there were collectors, such as the Greek shipping magnate Dakis Joannou, Los Angeles–based Lauren Taschen, Madrid-based Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengode, and the French collector Laurent Asscher.

To end his speech, Gioni said of Salamé, “I think we’re crowning the pope of art tonight.” A bit of a reach. But it’s also true that Pope Francis, the real pope, the one who lives down the hill in the Vatican, will soon appear on the scene. His Holiness will be making the first ever papal trip to the Venice Biennale this month, touring his own Holy See Pavilion filled with contemporary artists—even Cattelan!—and housed in an operational women’s prison. The visit will be documented by the photographer Juergen Teller.

They say the Venice Biennale is the Olympics of the art world, and it is. It’s also the Davos, the Aspen Institute, and the Cannes of the art world all rolled into one—with a dash of a selling fair if you know who to ask.

And like those cross-continental, chest-thumping über-expos, there’s a lot of geopolitical maneuvering. Two years ago, Russia left its pavilion empty in the wake of its war with Ukraine. This year, they’ve lent it to Bolivia, which must be thrilled to take up occupancy in one of the grandest structures in the Giardini. Perhaps it has something to do with the 23 million metric tons of lithium held in the Bolivian reserves, or the $450 million deal for “white gold” Russia and Bolivia signed at the end of last year.

Israel rebuffed calls to shut down its pavilion while the conflict in Gaza is ongoing, only to announce on Tuesday that the pavilion—at the behest of the artist, Ruth Patir, whose work is fully installed—will be locked up to the public until a ceasefire is announced and hostages are released. There were still protests from pro-Palestinian activists, who blanketed the dusty paths of the Giardini with leaflets proclaiming “NO DEATH IN VENICE / NO TO THE GENOCIDE PAVILION.”