A penetrating, ambitious look at the biennales that define modern art’s imagination.
Daniels’s debut in The Biennale Book is a tightly argued, sprawling study that lays bare the machinery of global art exhibitions and why they still matter in a fractured, politicized world. The foreword, with its meditation on biennales as “art’s necessary cathedrals,” sets the tone for the book’s philosophical scale. It frames the biennale not as a luxury spectacle but as a space where art resists the flattening forces of market logic and algorithmic culture. The author argues convincingly that in an era of digital overwhelm and political polarization, the biennale’s physicality, particularly its insistence on presence, attention, and collective encounter, has become more valuable, not less. This perspective threads through the text, culminating in the final chapter and afterword, which turn toward the future: climate crisis, ecological responsibility, democratic erosion, and the growing influence of digital aesthetics and global art markets.
Daniels writes with a clear sense of purpose: to make visible the underlying skeleton of the biennale system. Each of the ten biennales examined—Venice, São Paulo, Berlin, Gwangju, Havana, Istanbul, Liverpool, Sharjah, Sydney, and the Whitney—becomes a case study in how contemporary art responds to social tension. Venice is the grand paradox: a city that should have collapsed under its history yet still manages to reinvent itself between floodwaters and curatorial upheavals. Berlin is the unruly experiment, a place where curators try to “drag the present” into view, sometimes provoking the firestorms they hoped merely to analyze. Gwangju bears the moral gravity of its democratic uprising. Havana stages the “revolutionary paradox” of a state-steered avant-garde. Sharjah emerges quietly as one of the most consequential postcolonial platforms of the century, where new cultural cartographies are drafted in real time.
Daniels is honest about the biennale world’s hypocrisies, its decolonial rhetoric paired with old colonial structures, its critiques of capitalism bankrolled by the same capital it condemns. But he treats these contradictions not as failures but as inevitable symptoms of what one artist bluntly called “contradictions made visible.” It is precisely because biennales are imperfect, he argues, that they remain so revealing. One of the book’s quiet triumphs is its ability to speak to multiple audiences without sacrificing depth. Artists will hear their own anxieties echoed back to them; the fear of invisibility, the hunger for context, the uneasy relationship with institutions. Curators will recognize the delicate choreography behind every edition, the balance between vision and compromise. Scholars will appreciate the breadth of inquiry. And readers who simply wander into biennales out of curiosity will find themselves newly equipped to understand why these exhibitions have become cultural weather systems, shaping conversations long after the banners come down.
Lovers of Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton and The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds by Hans Belting will find much to savor here.
Pub date October 5, 2025
ISBN 979-8268442533
Price $44.95 (USD) Hardcover, $24.99 Paperback, $0.99 Kindle edition
