ABOVE: The exterior of the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea. Wired writes that more than 50 contemporary art biennials are duking it out for audience right now.

Wired News ran an article yesterday by their columnist iMomus on the prevalence, the abundance, nay, the glut of global biennials. At this very moment, he says, more than 50 such biennials or triennials are open, about to open, or just finished. From Yokohama to Istanbul, Liverpool to Havana, it seems you can’t spit these days without hitting a pavilion full of contemporary art.

Obviously there is art enough to go around, and curators to organize it; but the boom in biennales seems to have more to do with desperate pleas for attention by B-list cities than anything else. It’s like there’s a hierarchy, with Olympics at the top, World Expos next down the list, and then descending through film festivals, UN conferences, art biennials, figure-skating championships, spelling bees, and taxidermist conventions. The biennial one of those manageable spectacles for a mid-sized city: kind of showy, kind of daring, kind of sophisticated. But everyone’s caught on, so everyone’s having them now. It’s like limousines—they were classy when they were exclusive, but now that 13 year-olds take them to their junior high prom, it’s just kind of pathetic.

LINK: Wired News > Around the world in 80 biennials