For a institution that opened with a paean to art as a bridge across a fractured world, the 61st Venice Biennale has become anything but. Barely days after its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, invoked the city’s historic role as a place of encounter that “prepares peace through art”, the Giardini and the Arsenale have turned into a stage for raw geopolitical confrontation. The most striking blow came this week when more than seventy artists — representing nearly half of the Biennale’s participants and including the official representatives of twenty-two national pavilions — announced they would renounce the newly created popular awards, designed to replace the jury prizes scrapped earlier amid the crisis. The move, communicated through a terse statement on the art platform E-flux, has left the organisation scrambling to salvage any semblance of artistic cohesion.

The Biennale’s troubles began long before the public opening. During the professional preview days, masked activists from Pussy Riot and Femen stormed the Russian pavilion, which had been reopened for the first time since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “Russia kills, the Biennale exhibits,” their banners read. Police cordons struggled to contain the fury. At the same time, pro-Palestinian artists staged angry demonstrations against the presence of Israeli artist Belu-Simion Fainaru in the Arsenale, denouncing what they saw as a normalisation of state violence. Viewed from Rome, the protests represented an unacceptable politicisation of a cultural event; Buttafuoco’s insistence on “no preventive exclusion” had, in the Italian government’s view, been twisted into an invitation for conflict. Meanwhile, analysts in Paris noted that the Biennale’s original jury had already resigned over the inclusion of both Russia and Israel, leaving the organisers to invent a hastily arranged popular vote mechanism — precisely the system now repudiated by the artists themselves.

From a broader European perspective, the crisis reflects a deeper unease about the limits of cultural neutrality in an era of open war. The Biennale has long presented itself as a forum above politics, yet the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shattered that pretence. The mass boycott, far from a spontaneous gesture, was coordinated by a coalition that includes artists from countries as diverse as Chile, South Korea and Sweden, signalling that the discontent is not confined to any single bloc. What began as a protest against two specific pavilions has metastasised into a wholesale rejection of the Biennale’s governance. Looking ahead, the institution faces an uncomfortable choice: either it abandons its cherished principle of universal inclusion, or it risks seeing its most important event hollowed out by boycotts and walkouts. The art world, like the world itself, has lost patience with the fiction that culture can remain untouched by the conflicts it professes to transcend.