“Understand nothing about this ‘town’, where everything is traveling except the pigeons.”—Marcel Duchamp, postcard to Jacques Doucet, Venice, May 23, 1926.*

THOMASIN SLEIGH: Even though it is ambitious in its aspirations, grandiose in its size, and touted as the most important event on the contemporary art calendar, the Venice Biennale is shabby. It runs for five months. Venice is crumbly, and it crumbles over everything. Art works break. Venue attendants don’t know what they are talking about. No one knows what a ‘Collateral Event’ is. All the maps for the Biennale are inexplicably different and impossible to decipher. Visitors get lost and are only found months later, walking in circles in Campo Santo Stefano.