The Venice Biennale, a leading showcase for avant-garde art, opened in mid-June.

The Venice Biennale, a leading showcase for avant-garde art, opened in mid-June. It has been clear for years that contemporary art must soon reach the outermost bounds of silliness, so that artists will either have to find real jobs or return to painting landscapes and still lifes in oils. It is plain from the Biennale catalogue that this happy day is still some way off. At this year's event, Miyako Ishiuchi of Japan will be exhibiting 33 photographs of her late mother's personal possessions--lipsticks, chemises, and girdles, assorted false teeth and combs still clumped with hair. Iceland's Gabriela Fridriksdottir will be showing "a film of singer Bjork ... in which the Icelandic pixie is dolled up as the Venus of Willendorf and gives birth to a sticky 'demon'." A U.S.-Cuban collaboration by artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla features a life-sized clay hippopotamus, with a woman reading on it and, occasionally, whistling. Britain's Gilbert and George will be there with an as yet undeclared exhibit. They responded to the organizer's invitation with: "We are delighted, and promise to do our very worst"--no empty threat from artists whose past work has included pictures of excrement and body fluids. It all confirms that the one artistic form that never stales for our avant-garde is self-parody.