Blase at the Biennale.(Venice Biennale)

The connecting flight from London to Venice is practically an art-world charter. It's filled with curators, dealers and a few art critics, and boasts a notable spike in all-black attire. Everyone on board is going to the Venice Biennale, the every-other-year art extravaganza established in 1895. (Just opened, it runs through Nov. 4.) In the interest of spotting art's next enfant terrible or an exhibition concept that might travel well, some of them may have subscribed to a free mobile-phone service, supplied by the art magazine Frieze, which promises to "text you 3 to 5 times a day between the 6th and 9th of June to let you know where you should be--the best show, the most splendid pavilion or party--and what's not worth bothering with." In today's fast, noisy world, art is apparently no longer material for quiet contemplation, let alone esthetic pleasure. It's breaking news.

But like so much of the hype on round-the-clock radio stations, little of this news is genuinely breaking. And most of those en route to Venice already know that: 30 years after museums first welcomed modern art that burst the bounds of static objects (installation art, video, performance art and various combinations thereof), there's little anticipation among the Giardini Pubblici-bound passengers that they'll see something really new. The best they can hope for is a clever turn on a previously clever turn on a formerly revolutionary gambit. The ambient feeling at the Marco Polo airport taxi queue is, if not quite fatigue, cultural roteness: OK, this is the Biennale drill, we know what to do, so let's get on with it.

Supply is not the problem. Director Harald Szeemann has invited more than 100 artists into the main theme exhibition, "Platform of Thought," and at least that many more fill the 60-plus national pavilions and displays. Art's new status as front-page news is evidenced by the changing faces of the corporate sponsors: it used to be that only big, cold banks attached their names to modern-art enterprises to appear a little less big and cold. Then came tobacco companies hoping to cleanse their names. Recently, high-end clothing firms have discovered lots of potential customers standing around trying to look chic at art exhibitions, and now--as the new capitalism swallows bohemia whole-- here comes Bloomberg, the financial-news service, to underwrite the British pavilion.

The British entry is one of the "hot" pavilions, with long lines of spectators waiting to get in to see the work of Mark Wallinger, famous for his baldheaded statue of Christ placed atop a giant plinth in Trafalgar Square last year. That work--looking here on the gallery floor like a towel attendant in a steam bath--is the pavilion's centerpiece. It's accompanied, in adjoining rooms, by a couple of videos--one of the artist as a blind man in front of a backward-running subway escalator, and another, in super slo-mo, of people coming through the arrivals door at an airport. It's called "Threshold to the Kingdom," and the sound track is Allegri's "Miserere." Very ironic, very British and, since the heyday of J. Arthur Rank, very done to death.

An even hotter pavilion is Germany's, with longer lines and fewer people at a time being admitted to navigate the difficult spaces that Gregor Schneider has transported from "Dead House," his ongoing trans- formation (rooms within rooms, ceilings lowered, corridors to nowhere, etc.) of a desultory tenement house in his native town of Rheydt. Schneider, who started the house project in 1985 when he was just 16, would probably be the closest thing to a Biennale discovery, if he hadn't already startled the art world with a similar piece in London's "Apocalypse" show last year.

...