The Value of Venice Biennale

　　The International Art Exhibition's specific symbolic value goes beyond the Venice Biennale premises, which it contributed to found over 110 years ago.

　　The Art Biennial Exhibition has always testified avant-garde trends, schools, movements and individualities, thus setting an example which has often been followed all over the world.

　　The Biennale has played - during last century as well as today, despite the evolution in models and art production and promotion systems - a central role indispensable for artistic research, thus becoming a magnet and an international creative laboratory on contemporaneity.

　　Given our responsibility and the international exchange we participate in, we are aware that exhibition and contemporary art promotion models, as those we are presenting here today, are in need of deep changes and structural innovation, both in the form in which they are developed and in the ways they are presented to the public.

　　In 2004 we recognized our mission and need to start a new course towards a redefinition of our role, by launching a reflection that would involve the 2005 and 2007 exhibitions, as well as by listening and gathering opinions and contributions from a significant part of the contemporary art world during a Symposium we organized in 2006.

　　We have chosen to give a wider time perspective to the Biennale Artistic Directors' work (not only as concerns the Visual Arts section), thus granting continuity rather than irregularity to their efforts in and for the Biennale.

　　Contrary to the past, when the Artistic Director was appointed as the new edition was close at hand, Robert Storr was entrusted with the role of curator as early as in 2004. This has allowed him to develop his job during three years, thus having more time than any other curator in the past Biennale International Art Exhibitions.

　　I invite you to look at the edition we are presenting today as a stage of a complex journey the Biennale started in 2004 - a three-year journey granting much time to the preparation of this show, which boasts two women curators at the head of the International Art Exhibition and after many years has organized a new reflection on contemporary art, as well as being able to re-open a pavilion solely dedicated to Italian culture (entrusted to Franco Purini for Italian architecture last year and to Ida Gianelli this year), which will make its debut in the current Art Exhibition edition, of which it represents an important novelty.