Managed to catch the Venice Biennal on its last legs, when I was in the Serenissima last week. It proved to be an exhilarating surprise. Usually, it is a slog mitigated by perhaps a handful of interesting work and, if you are lucky, a standout or two. Circumnavigating the national pavilions especially tends to be tedious, with individual curators either playing it safe by banking on established names or simply shooting in the dark and serving up uninspiring up-and-comings. Figuring out who is the next hot thing has always been something of a crapshoot, and spotting real quality even harder, so the odds are obviously stacked against the good or interesting outweighing the less so.

Reluctant to draw too rash, generalist conclusions as to the general state of the visual arts now as opposed to then, I can therefore only attribute the relative high quality of the national exhibitions this year to fortuity. It is not like anything was fundamentally different from previous years, just that there were more quality showings in the pavilions. To me there were a couple of real standouts this year, as well as several more notable national exhibitions. I will try to touch upon the ones that made the biggest impressions here, while in the name of relative brevity entirely leaving out all the chaff.