An alternative view of Ando and Piano's curatorial architecture in Venice.

The Punta della Dogana (AR October 2009) art gallery, with its bronze weathercock statue of Fortune turning over a gilt world globe atop a square tower, was where merchants brought their goods to be taxed before they were shipped to the warehouses of their palaces further up the Grand Canal in Venice. It showed, displayed and imposed the power of the Republic, but the city that succeeded it no longer exacts tax on goods. The Venetian authorities, which had already ceded the Palazzo Grassi to one of the world's most notable shopping magnates, Francois Pinault (who had Gae Aulenti's somewhat precious interiors stripped and reduced by Tadao Ando's very sober, very minimal discipline) handed the Dogana to him as well.

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Pinault remained faithful to Ando, who has taken surprising liberties with the space, breaking its height by inserting a gallery and deranging the rhythm of the walls by inserting a large, square exhibition chamber. The salt-consumed bricks (unavoidable in Venice) have been replaced or repaired, and the precautions against flooding seem well managed. The woven steel bands of the grills that cover all openings take up Carlo Scarpa's design for those of the Olivetti showroom in Piazza San Marco, in a deliberate homage to a local master.

About the exhibits, Pinault seems to follow the same policy as in his commercial activities--to 'emphasise star-brands as against star-designers'--so there can't be anything personal about his choices, though metaphysical claims are made for it. As Paul Finch walked through Felix Gonzalez-Torres' innocuous red-and-white-bead screen, he may not have realised that it symbolises drops of blood and the pills that the artist, dying of AIDS, had to swallow. Once past it, you see Maurizio Cattelan's stuffed stallion hanging in mid-air (pictured) and, hung next, Luke Tuymans' very large (3.5 x 5m) and very bland acrylic still life is supposed to be a comment on the 9/11 events by making no reference to them.

The other exhibits represent what the best-known artists are about: the Chapman Brothers' dinky infernos (appropriately titled Fucking Hell) are near-neighbours of Cindy Sherman's inflated photographic self-portraits, which surround Jeff Koons' white plaster bust of himself in homage to Antonio Canova's Cupid and Psyche. And so on. The humourlessness of these sublimities seems out of synch with the thoughtful and elegant sobriety of the interior.

Ten minutes' walk away, in the equally venerable and spatially similar Salt warehouses, another architect, Renzo Piano, has arranged a retrospective exhibition of the Venetian artist Emilio Vedova (an unremittingly political artist known as 'Jackson Pollock of the barricades'), who died three years ago. Being an action painter and sparing in his use of colour, a conventional alignment of his canvases might have been a bit wearisome--and he tended to avoid this himself.

Piano remedied this by stacking the paintings vertically at one end of the hall, from which they are mechanically withdrawn, in groups of two or three, and moved slowly through the space before coming down to floor level at the opposite end of the hall, so the visitor has time to examine them in some detail. As you might expect from Piano, the detailing of the metal rigging is impeccable: the intelligence of the architect has operated on both the space and the exhibits to create a uniquely rewarding experience.

www.palazzograssi.it/en