VENICE—Sharon Stone is the only woman running in the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, at least as far as the Venice Biennale art festival is concerned.
Stone appears in a mock TV campaign ad dreamt up by Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli and crafted by the same media guru who used to advise U.S. President George W. Bush. Stone's pseudo-opponent in the art installation is French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who has the benefit of Bill Clinton's former consultant in his corner.
Their dueling, 60-second advertisements play simultaneously on video screens directly across from each other at the Venice Biennale, sometimes called the "Oscars" of the art world, which opened for a press preview on Thursday. "I wanted somebody from Hollywood, which is the place where people search for the ultimate fiction. And I wanted somebody from the world of philosophy, which is the search for the ultimate truth," Vezzoli said. "These would be in obvious conflict, one with the other."
Stone spits out sound bites such as "peace is not just the end of the war in Iraq". She receives a glowing recommendation from the supposed mother of a U.S. soldier, who assures that Stone "is going to do right by our men and women in service".
Vezzoli said his goal was also "to do a deconstruction of the role of media manipulation." The title of his exhibition is called "Democrazy" and opens to the public starting this week.
Vezzoli is no stranger to the world of celebrity art. His past videos have included the likes of French actress Catherine Deneuve and Brazilian actress Sonia Braga.
Another exhibit at the Biennale is a Brazilian shantytown, complete with a drug trafficking gang, riot police, a hospital and even a soccer pitch—oh, and it's at least 20 times smaller than in real life. The so-called "Morrinho project", created by the residents of a real Rio de Janeiro shantytown, was among one of the most talked-about installations at the Venice Biennale art festival.
Those behind the Brazilian project are still mildly uncomfortable about being called "artists". For them, it all started as a game, building their own version of doll-houses that simply recreated the life they saw around them.
"I never thought it was art. We were just playing around, like normal," said Maycon Souza de Oliveira, who started the project with his older brother almost a decade ago, when he was seven years old.
Their model in Rio stretches 300 square meters. To do a smaller version in Venice, they flew in more than 5,000 bricks from Brazil and used 120 cubic meters of sand. It took three weeks to mount the "favela", the Brazilian word for shantytown.
"I think the favelas are a big part of Brazil. But it's a hidden part. You can't go in," said Silke Eberspacher, a German visitor to the preview. She had been to Brazil 4 or 5 times, but, like most tourists, never stepped foot inside a favela. "This shows us what it's like to live there and what can be good about it."
The Brazilians themselves, thrilled at the chance to fly around the world, are highly positive about their experiences but careful not to glorify poverty.
Characters in the miniature favela, which are made from Lego blocks, often die during role-playing by the artists.
At the same time as the Biennale, the art elite who gathered in Venice are rolling out the red carpet for German artist Thomas Demand's tribute to bogus pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
Hanging from one of the buildings in the lagoon city is a massive image by Demand portraying the Niger embassy in Rome—a suspected origin of forged documents claiming Saddam Hussein had sought uranium for a weapons program from Niger.
This was the same claim U.S. President George W. Bush cited in his State of the Union address in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Those infamous "16 words" of his address were later retracted.
"What interested me is that this whole thing starts with a fake, which is even a bad fake, but it develops into something more," said Demand.
"The fake becomes something which has a real impact, a real consequence." To underline the duplicitous nature of the use of intelligence the images of the Niger embassy are actually the result of a full-sized model that he meticulously reconstructed—using cardboard—and not of the real building.
The dossier itself was hardly a forgery masterpiece, filled with basic mistakes like citing a foreign minister of Niger who had already left the post.
But the documents, and the Italian freelance spy who tried to peddle them to Western intelligence agencies, have been the subject of lengthy investigative reports on both sides of Atlantic trying to unravel pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Given the unwanted attention the dossier had drawn, the Niger embassy initially declined Demand's request for access. But Demand said the embassy eventually agreed, after months of insistence, to speak with him. He said they told him the embassy had done nothing wrong.
Investigative newspaper reports in Italy also point to a break-in at the Niger embassy in 2001, when stationery and official seals were stolen. "Paper has been stolen. blank paper. All of my work has been based on paper," Demand said, explaining his motivations. The embassy declined comment on Demand's exhibition.
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