Moon Babies, Piss Tanks and Cicciolina: A Dispatch From the 61st Venice Biennale

The 61st Venice Biennale brought all kinds of mayhem and spectacle. It was a heated year from the jump. A week before the festival even opened, the jury resigned en masse, leaving a people’s choice structure in its place. Eighty artists then withdrew their work from award consideration, setting the tone for a week where consensus felt impossible at every turn. But it was also a week packed with joy and humor. It was hard not to be tickled by the 208 babies scattered around the Japan Pavilion, Oriol Vilanova’s 50,000 postcards in the Spanish Pavilion, and the Holy See’s active listening Pavilion, which offered a kind of cortisol reset. The week’s most viral moment, though, was courtesy of Florentina Holzinger. The Austrian performance artist dangled naked from a bell, and then languished in a tank of purified urine, (Biennale visitors from around the world were invited to contribute to the purification system via two porta potties available on each side). I personally refrained, but left with a lot more questions about the role of spectacle and schock. One million Camparis, Marlboros, and wrong turns through narrow side streets later, I set out to find some answers. Below I chronicle some of my week, including a seductive performance by Cicciolina, a mini-Met Gala debrief with Janelle Zara (this year’s theme was “Fashion Is Art”…), and the discovery of “pink-chip” art, courtesy of Jewel. 

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SUNDAY 8:45 PM, MAY 3, 2026 JFK TERMINAL 4

I’m sucking down a Shake Shack milkshake on Klonopin. I’m waiting at the gate in my incredible new purple J. Crew pants and my filthy Repetto pumps. I look like a total mess, and I didn’t have the foresight to realize I’d bump into half the industry getting on this flight. Mortified and agitated, I wade down the aisle and find myself quietly amused by the art world caste system laid out before me, row by row. Mega-dealers Jeffrey Deitch and Jeanne Greenberg are looking cozy and blissed out in first class. A couple of Chelsea and Tribeca dealers are straddled between business class and the front of economy. Personally, I’m slumming it by the back tires with a few downtown dealers and their begrudging assistants. I sleep about 20 minutes total.

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MONDAY 4:45 PM, MAY 4, 2026  SAN MARCO

I can’t quite believe this hotel room. This is what you pray to find on an Italian vacation. I’m in opulent-damask-decadent-romantic-Venetian-gilded-baroque heaven. It’s almost psychedelic. I don’t even care if it’s haunted. I want to be haunted by anything chic enough to be living in this room. I bumble along to a few openings at the Bregguren Institute and AMA Venezia, but running on no sleep, I won’t pretend I’m taking in a single thing. 

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TUESDAY 2:30PM, MAY 5, 2026  PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION

Jet lag, improper footwear, 320 unread emails. It’s not much, but it’s honest. Chanel is hosting a live recording of their arts and culture podcast followed by a private invitation to the Peggy Guggenheim collection. Do I miss the talk? Yes. Do I make it on the private boat shuttle to the collection? Also yes! Seeing it while closed to the public felt like hitting the jackpot.

7:12PM 

I’m at the opening for the Bahamian Pavilion at the San Trovaso Art Space. It’s the first time in 13 years that the Bahamas are exhibiting in Venice, and the room feels charged with excitement. The show stages a posthumous conversation between Lavar Munroe and John Beadle, who passed away in 2024. You can read all about it here. 

7:44 PM

Over at Sanya Kantarovsky’s Basic Failure opening at Palazzo Loredan, the paintings are so soft and wobbly, and I’m feeling a little drunk and wobbly myself. They’re making me kind of emotional. The Palazzo is such a delirious backdrop for these kinds of shows. A building this beautiful can easily eclipse the work, but the paintings rest so gently alongside the embellishments, the light fixtures, and the patinated mirrors. 

9:34 PM 

I’m at dinner with some New York friends and a group of artists from Berlin and Vienna. I’m drunk and disoriented, and honestly? I’m having the time of my life. The table is alive with gossip. WHICH London blue-chip gallery has the audacity to offer a director’s role at £45,000? HOW exactly is this gallerist planning to tell their artist that their work is in perpetual decline? An impossibly beautiful Spanish girl sitting opposite me reveals what she knows about the highly anticipated Austrian Pavilion: “She will climb into a bell naked and hang, and then she will get in a tank of piss. People from all over the world will come to these urinals to piss, the piss will be purified, and the artist will live in a tank of the purified piss,” she reports between sips of Campari. “It is INSANE.”

I don’t remember her name, but I love her outfit. So here it is for you to enjoy too.

11:25 PM 

We trot across town to the Gagosian party where, for the first time this week, I learn that the list won’t save me. It’s also the first time this week I’m going to be outright shoved by some of the artworld’s least suspecting and most buttoned-up characters. Why is it so hard to get in? A Gagosian director tells me over a cigarette after I narrowly avoid suffocation at the barricade and make entry, “Larry doesn’t want to be paying for every gallerist’s assistant’s drinks tonight.” I guess I wouldn’t either. I start talking to Cy Schnabel who’s peering over the crowd, hanging against a post. “You know, the party isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” I nod unenthusiastically, drown the last of my bellini and take myself home.

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WEDNESDAY MAY 6, 2026 11:09 AM

I make it to the Giardini before midday in the pouring rain—a serious achievement. The first thing I see when I arrive are plumes of pink smoke blanketing an umbrella-clad crowd. Pussy Riot have staged a colorful intervention at the Russian Pavilion, which has made a controversial return to the Biennale this year. I stand watching with Greta Rainbow, who reminds me of the likelihood that Pussy Riot are actually Putin operatives. “If you think about it, they just always seem to show up at the right time, and then leave at the right time…”

11:14 AM 

I reply to an Artnet reporter’s Instagram story, asking, “Where do the moon babies reside!?” “The Japan Pavilion,” Jo Lawson-Tancred kindly writes back. I make them my first stop. There’s 208 of them and they’re wearing reflective sunglasses so you can confront your child-rearing abilities (or lack there of) head-on. By the way, those things are HEAVY. So heavy, I become convinced I’m not supposed to have picked one up. The person working there kindly informs me that babies of that age are actually heavy in real life. Well, who knew? I’m not struck by baby fever, but I am highly amused by the range of expressions on the dolls. Look at this one! Pure joy.

12:05 PM

For your sake and mine, I’ll speed run through a few of these. German Pavilion: artist Sung Tieu has clad the entire Nazi-era facade in a mosaic of over three million marble stones. Inside, the late Henrike Naumann (who sadly passed just weeks before the opening) has staged her final work: a maximalist domestic interior about how ideology seeps into home life. I LOVE the living room piece that feels like it’s about to fall off the wall. Photos don’t do it justice. US Pavilion (not photographed): every bit as tragic as the reports, I’m afraid. Someone I bump into (forgive me, I’ve forgotten who you are now) says it’s like breezing through Soho House in there.

12:35 PM 

I make it to the opening performance at the Austrian Pavilion. It’s absolutely packed,  hundreds of umbrellas jostling. This is the art world’s BIEBERCHELLA. Whispers of the bell’s function and the piss tank are rippling through the crowd. I’m chatting to a very chic, older Austrian lady. She says, “Performance and shock is in our DNA. We’ve been doing it for 600 years.” I try to do the math and remember what was happening 600 years ago on earth, my face doing something polite in the meantime.

The beautiful Spanish girl from dinner was right. There is a bell, a crane, and a naked woman (the Austrian performance artist, Florentina Holzinger) crawling up inside it. Before the performance starts, the curator Nora-Swantje Almes tells the audience, “We should allow ourselves to feel challenged,” by what we’re about to see. My little shoes are filled with rainwater and the spokes of other people’s umbrellas keep poking me in the head, so I’d say I feel pretty challenged. Inside the bell, Florentina thrusts her body from side to side while upside down. Now I’m thinking, this woman really must have abs of steel. The performance is emptying my brain rather than filling it. I post a video of her jangling around in the bell on my Instagram story and caption it “It’s giving bell.” That’s all I have in me at this time.

2:32 PM 

I’m damp, my hair is fucked up, I’m carrying multiple bags like a vagabond traveller who’s partaking in black magic time travel. I can’t believe I’m wearing these stupid little heels in the pouring rain. I’m at the Dries Van Noten Foundation. I was previously warned that the show is “slop.” Earlier I was gabbing with Jannelle Zara about the state of the world. AI overlords, the media industry imploding, and of course, Monday’s Met Gala where the theme was hilariously, “Fashion Is Art.” Jannelle says, “I went to Fondazione Dries van Noten the same day as the Met Gala, both of which made me realize that the fashion world must think something’s art if it’s ugly.” I wonder how much of the inverse is true. 

They weren’t wrong. The show has some significant curatorial holes. But I’m charmed by the wallpaper, the light fixtures, and the strawberries and champagne. Also! Remember the Christian Lacroix jacket from Anna Wintour’s first ever Vogue cover (famously styled with a pair of $50 Guess jeans)? Well, it’s here! 

7:02 PM 

Look at these zip-up overshoes. They’re kind of medical chic? Maybe if Hantavirus erupts in the US we’ll all be sliding into these. 

11:18 PM

I almost lose my life in line for the Cicciolina performance. The list? The VIP list?? The press line??? These things are meaningless against the iron will of a clout bouncer from Berlin wrangling a raucous crowd. I’m squished between a bunch of scenesters, using the last of my lung capacity to plead my case for entry. It feels so stupid. But also, it’s Cicciolina: the former porn star, the once-wife and muse to Jeff Koons, the Italian parliamentarian, the woman who once offered to sleep with Saddam Hussein in exchange for peace in the Gulf, and my favorite Snapchat filter baddie.

By some miracle, it works. I’m in. The floor is covered in broken glass and I’m bumping into a really fun circuit of people from New York and London. Emma Stern, Günseli Yalcinkaya Lydia Traill, Theo Belci. Cicciolina’s performance itself? Regal. Joyous. Obviously!

Thursday 7 May, 2026 12:04 PM SAN MARCO

Shoe watch continues! Look at these?!?! Brocade chopines…

12:54 PM 

Back at the Giardini and the sun is shining. The Russian Pavilion is free from protest today and I sheepishly head in. The exhibition that caused such a stir? The Tree is Rooted in the Sky. Just two sort of embellished trees, one downstairs and one upstairs. A DJ set blaring EDM, young people jostling their bodies to the beat. “I heard people were paid to dance,” my friend whispers in my ear. “It’s giving end of civilization vibes.” Russia, was it worth it? I suppose it’s worth noting there’s a very empty open bar upstairs. 

1:14 PM 

There’s a two-hour line for the Austrian Pavilion. A two-hour wait to see the piss tank! I go up to the press desk and start talking frantically and they let me in through the back. There are women in cutesy lavender and teal cleaning uniforms helping to move things along. Maybe Miu Miu should have extended their SS26 aprons into a collab here. A girl working tells me that all hell has broken loose today. Someone took a shit in the urinal and the whole system is about to break down. I’m horrified. I’m also confused. Are the tank occupants going to be switching over? How often? How many of them are there? How many hours can you spend languishing in purified public urine before your skin starts to totally break down or you contract some kind of novel virus?

My friend Susannah replies to my instagram story of the tank, “Is art ok? Is it?” I write back, “You know, I like to think that as long as I’m entertained it is.”

1:57 PM 

Round two of the pavilion speed run. Danish Pavilion: Sexy! Spanish Pavilion: Immensely charmed by the 50,000 postcards. The repetition is incredibly soothing, sort of the equivalent of smoking a cigarette. Central Pavilion: Raed Yassin’s Warhol of Arabia draws from an anecdote about Andy Warhol going to Kuwait in 1977, and I am charmed.

8:25 PM 

Jordan Roth performance. AI-SLOP-IANA. I’m so confused.

9:10 PM 

I crash a dinner with a couple of people on the Artnet team. I tell them that someone destroyed the filtration system at the Austrian Pavilion by releasing their bowels into it. Ben Davis is quick to set me straight: “You didn’t know that they say that as part of the performance?!?” Now I just feel stupid and hungry. The group just returned from seeing Jewel’s show (yes, the Jewel who once enquired about your soul being saved in 1996). I hear there’s some really woefully unironic Gen X Alec Monopoly art in there. Birkins, Starbucks cups, a Chanel Machine gun, and a large scale pink IUD all feature. Sound familiar? “Pink-chip” art, we coin it. 

2:09 AM 

I opt out of the Swiss party, out of the Kelsey Lu performance, which was apparently a huge mistake. I hear it is flooring, and that both Matthieu Blazy and Willem Dafoe are among the attendees. I crash the end of another dinner. We shuffle to another drinks thing. To another drinks thing. I take a call outside. I smoke my last cigarette. I chug along to Jordan Casteel’s birthday… Conversation is escaping me… My words are meaningless, slipping between the streets the party has spilled out onto… I’m covered in mosquito bites… My feet hurt… My voice is hoarse, and I’m choking out another bit of small talk with these kids from Germany I met somewhere along the way this week. I feel it slowly, and then all at once: There’s nothing left for me here. Arrivederci, Venezia.