More than 700,000 people visited the documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany last summer; 800,000 visited the Venice Biennale, and 120,000 visited the Berlin Biennale the same summer. Hundreds of thousands more visited major international exhibitions that take place every few years in cities around the world. What draws so many people to international art biennales? Why do they spend their time, their energy and their money to travel to particularly hot cities and packed exhibit sites, to stand for hours in front of hundreds of artworks, or to scuttle restlessly between dozens of art projects and public events? Have these giant exhibits become today’s pilgrimage sites, in the absence of organized ritualistic sites for the contemporary secular person? Are these sites of pilgrimage to which people come from all ends of the earth to perform the rites of cultural worship – to gather with other believers and pay homage to the ultimate products of contemporary human culture? Or are these preferred tourism sites for a pleasant summer vacation, cities where cultural consumerism combines with different kinds of acquisition – a playground offering a unique, giant and fascinating experience, an amusement park of art? Or is this a kind of traveling academy, whose visitors wish to learn something about the world at this time through the lens of art?
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