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‘Taking Venice’ Review: A Tasty Doc About Robert Rauschenberg Winning the 1964 Venice Biennale. But Was It a U.S. ‘Conspiracy’? Uh, No
Amei Wallach's documentary takes us back to the 1964 Venice Biennale, where a PR campaign in the art world could seem the height of scandal.
In the ’50s and early ’60s, the grand prize often went to the French (Matisse, Max Ernst, Georges Braque), but in 1964 the U.S. decided to mount a campaign of “cultural diplomacy” in the hopes that one of its own artists — Robert Rauschenberg — would win the Biennale. The event marked a paradigm shift: the overthrow of Paris as the center of the art world, and the movement toward a new age in which New York and its freewheeling American stars (Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol) would now hold sway. At the Biennale, the U.S. backed Rauschenberg with a massive promotional campaign, one that the movie, at times, flirts with labeling a “conspiracy.” Everyone there knew that the Americans were throwing their weight around, working vigorously to do everything within their power to win the grand prize.
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