From aesthetic revolution to experience economy: the dilemma of the biennial age

When we look at Eugène Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People today, we don't see just a revolution. We see a threshold. The moment when one aesthetic regime tears through and enters another aesthetic regime.

In the foreground there are corpses. There is dirt. There is the street. There are scattered bodies. For the eye accustomed to the academic order's clean and controlled understanding of beauty until that day, this painting produces a kind of unease. Because new aesthetics often first comes as discomfort.

Art history is full of examples of this. The Impressionists were scorned as "half-finished." Duchamp was accused of mocking art. Fluxus was seen as nonsense. Joseph Beuys's use of felt and fat was considered charlatanism. Many works we look at with respect on museum walls today were found meaningless in their own time.

Therefore, the initial discomfort felt towards contemporary art is not a criterion by itself. Because every aesthetic revolution first appears wrong.

But right here another question emerges: Does every boundary transgression really produce a new aesthetic? Or does it sometimes only produce a bigger experience?

The 2026 Venice Biennale houses two works that pose this question to us concretely. Florentina Holzinger's SEA WORLD VENICE in the Austrian pavilion, and Miet Warlop's IT NEVER SSST in the Belgian pavilion. Both are impressive. Both violate disciplinary boundaries. But both are not doing the same thing.

Holzinger fills the pavilion's modern architecture with water. Two portable toilets stand in the courtyard; visitors are invited to urinate here and the urine feeds the massive water tank in the center. Inside the tank, a performer with diving mask stays underwater for hours. On the side, "maintenance workers" struggle with pipes gone out of control; a brown liquid splashes on the windows. Inside the flooded pavilion, another performer circles with a jet ski. The work presents ecological collapse with a theme park aesthetic and includes the viewer literally in the closed circuit of this collapse.

Warlop's work operates on a different register. The pavilion has transformed into a place between a construction site and sports arena with its tribunes covered with plaster tiles. Performers rush around for hours singing hymns, playing drums, throwing tiles at each other. The most striking moment is Alice Marchiori's solo section. Marchiori makes great effort to wear a narrow mini skirt made of plaster. Warlop calls this "the skirt inside the head" - she climbs the tribunes while bruises form on her legs. As the skirt sticks to her body, climbing becomes impossible. Finally, as the plaster tiles fall to the ground, Marchiori also rolls down from the tribunes and collapses on a table with her sweaty, dusty body.

Both works are powerful. Both are technically masterful. But here a distinction must be made.

Marchiori's scene produces a kind of intellectual entrapment. The plaster skirt - that is, a hardened object that prevents movement, trapping the body in its own form - is a concrete proposition about the female body and the form that surrounds it. The impossibility of climbing, beyond being dramatic tension, is an object of thought. The viewer continues to work even after leaving the scene. Thinking about what the skirt image corresponds to can be separated from the scene itself. This is a movement close to what art history calls "aesthetic revolution": form produces a thought from within itself.

Holzinger's pavilion, however, settles into a different register. The visual grandeur is indisputable. The water-filled architecture, jet ski, urine tank, diver - all are individually impressive. But does the work as a whole open a thought, or does it transform the ecological apocalypse image into a more engaging, more memorable, more shareable experience? The message "we are accomplices" is already delivered the moment the viewer enters the toilet. The rest of the work doesn't make one think about this message, it intensifies it. This difference is not small.

This is not a dismissive distinction. On the contrary, it's a serious aesthetic question directed at the very heart of contemporary art. Because disciplines have long since dissolved. Theater entered the art field. Sound installations moved to galleries. Cinema spread inside space. Performance replaced the art object. Objecting to this would be simplistic. Art history has continuously violated its own boundaries as it progresses.

The problem is not boundary violation. The problem is sometimes loss of intensity.

Another risk may be emerging today: the experience economy. Our age transforms everything into experience. Food is not just food. Travel is not just travel. Museum is not just museum. Everything must be shareable, engaging and memorable.

Art is not exempt from this either. Biennials can sometimes transform from a space of thought into a high-intensity sensory flow. The viewer no longer looks at length. They participate. They record. They consume. And they leave. Sometimes what remains is not an idea, but only the residue of experience.

Right here art history's old question returns: Why does a work become art?

Because great art often doesn't just impress. It settles into the mind. It makes one uneasy. It returns days later. It produces a kind of intellectual echo. If Delacroix's painting is still working today, the reason is not only its dramatic nature; that painting broke an era's way of seeing. If Duchamp is still discussed today, the issue is not only provocation; he displaced the ontology of art.

Marchiori's plaster skirt stands within this line. But which side of the line is Holzinger's jet ski on? The issue is not to make a definitive judgment; but it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about contemporary performance without asking this question.

Perhaps this is the real crisis contemporary art faces today. When does art create aesthetic revolution, when does it only turn into an impressive show? The distinction is not at a formal boundary - not at the boundary between theater, performance, installation, cinema. The distinction is in whether the work continues to work after the viewer leaves.

Does a work end when the viewer exits, or does it begin there?

The truly disturbing finding is this: The problem is not art transcending its boundaries. The problem is that art sometimes begins to resemble too much the language of the society of spectacle. And this resemblance can occur even in moments when it appears most political, most critical, most "awakening." Because the experience economy is a mechanism that can package even criticism as an experience.

Good art perhaps begins right here: where it doesn't give definitive answers, but leaves the viewer to seek answers.