Big Ideas.(Venice Biennale)

"Tranquila," a Spanish observer was heard to judge, with a warmth just short of enthusiasm, on the opening day of the keenly anticipated fifty-second edition of the Venice Biennale--the most venerable of international art shows--directed by the American curator, critic, and teacher Robert Storr. That sounded on target to me. "Boring," or its equivalent in other languages, was an adjective more commonly bruited about, but I found myself looking sharply at those who uttered it and wishing they were more attentive. Many were collectors, dealers, and kibbitzers impatiently primed for the casino action of the Art Basel fair, which opened three days later. Others were a trusty contemporary type: the novelty addict. (Their ilk is served by auxiliary attractions in Venice, such as an entertaining show of the French billionaire Francois Pinault's violently trendy collection, at the Palazzo Grassi--champagne to the main event's tawny port.) For me, the conduciveness to meditation that holds up throughout the acres of new and newish international art in the Biennale's two main sites--the grandiose Fascist-era Italian Pavilion, featuring, as it usually does, a world-embracing exhibition of putatively top artists, and the quarter-mile-long Arsenale, an ancient facility of the Venetian navy, devoted to emerging talent--borders on the miraculous. As the director, Storr curated both venues, laying a cool hand on the brow of today's money-fevered, intellectually dishevelled global art world. His presentations, grounded in his own personal tastes and loyalties, in the painting-rich Italian Pavilion, and in his penchant for melancholic political idealism, in an Arsenale that favors conceptual projects, court consideration of a genuinely critical sort. His effort is no less estimable for being, perhaps, quixotic. It thoroughly overshadows the village of national pavilions, in the leafy Giardini (overseen by curators from their home countries), whose local heroes--Great Britain's Tracey Emin, Germany's Isa Genzken, France's Sophie Calle--register, for the most part, wanly.

Storr was born in 1949, and earned an M.F.A. in painting (he still paints, though rarely shows his work) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. I have known him for years; he is a cosmopolitan of eager charm, formidable intelligence, and limited humor. (He is notorious for writing long, dense letters to editors, in hair-trigger response to perceived slights.) As a student spending a year abroad in France, he was swept up in the revolutionary fervor of 1968--a formative experience, he has said. He rose to prominence in New York in the nineteen-eighties as a critic championing artists at eccentric or challenging angles to fashionable taste, many of them women--notably Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Spero, Susan Rothenberg, and Elizabeth Murray--along with Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman, Gerhard Richter, and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. (All these artists are prominent in Storr's shows. Another of his favorites, the late conceptualist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, commands the American pavilion this year, curated by other hands, to antiseptic, pious effect.) Storr was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art from 1990 to 2002--his exhibitions there included retrospectives of Richter, Max Beckmann, and Tony Smith--and a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University from 2002 to 2006. He is now the dean of the Yale School of Art. The most anti-academic of academics, he has fiercely opposed rationalist theoretical tendencies in criticism, arguing for the priority of the artist's initiative and the viewer's intuition. As the first-ever American-born director of a Venice Biennale, he mounts his point of view on tank tracks, titling the event, with Storrian benevolent bossiness, "Think with the Senses--Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense."

The product is as lucid as its label is murky. It kicks off, in the Italian Pavilion, with a skylit exhibition of paintings by the paragon of antic irrationalism, Sigmar Polke: abstract works, with cartoonish elements, that are preposterously big on purpose, I think, to make sport of their own ambition. Translucent, in brownish pigmented resin, they are hypersensitive to the moods of the Venetian sky. Then come superb abstractions by established stars--Ellsworth Kelly, Richter, and Ryman--and by two veteran painters of small, tangy pictures, who should be better known, the American Thomas Nozkowski and the Belgian Raoul De Keyser. Storr hereby invites open-eyed ...