The oldest institution of contemporary art will distribute its awards this year by visitor vote. It is not an initiative of citizen participation nor a curatorial experiment: it is what remained when the jury departed and the gap had to be resolved in a matter of days. The Venice Biennale has been collecting votes since May and will count them on 22 November, upon the closing of the exhibition.
It is appropriate to recount how this was reached, because the history has been simplified in both directions. On 22 April, the composition of the international jury was announced: five women with first-rate curatorial trajectories. That same day, the jury published a statement of intention in which it announced that it would refrain from considering those countries whose leaders were accused of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. Eight days later, it resigned en bloc, referring to that statement. Israel and Russia were participating with national pavilions, and there were protests against both during the week prior to the opening.
Another front was active during the same edition. In March, the European Commission warned that it would consider suspending or terminating an ongoing grant to the Biennale if Russia participated, invoking both the framework of sanctions and democratic values; in July, the specialist press reported that the two-million-euro grant had effectively been withdrawn. The Biennale has announced that it will appeal. It is worth noting, to understand their position, that a country owning a pavilion in the Giardini does not request to participate: it notifies. There is no admission procedure that the institution can deny.
It is worth clarifying what kind of criterion this is, as it is often misreported. It was not a political preference of the jury: it was a reference to the accusations formulated by the International Criminal Court, the body that exists precisely to establish them. And the jury did not apply it to the ruling. It resigned. It did not impose its position on the result: it withdrew.
I shall not enter into the underlying conflicts here, as the purpose of this text is different. I do state, however, because it governs everything I write here, that compliance with human rights is not one position among others to which a counterweight must be sought.
What occupies me begins on 30 April, when the Biennale had to decide what to do without a jury. It could have suspended the awards; it has a precedent, and not a distant one, in its own history, because after the protests of 1968 it ceased to present them and did not recover them in the art exhibition until 1986. Eighteen years without awarding prizes. The institution knows how to do it. This time it chose something else: to move the ceremony to November and create two Visitors’ Lions, one for the best participant in the main exhibition and another for the best national participation, decided by public vote.
And here is the revealing detail of the episode: to vote, one must have a ticket and have visited both venues, the Giardini and the Arsenale. The visit is not declared: it is verified in the records of the ticketing system. Twenty-four hours after the system detects your passage through the second venue, you receive an email with a link to vote, once only, anonymously.
Read carefully what this implies. A jury is a mechanism with qualification and accountability: individuals by name, chosen for their competence, who deliberate among themselves, reach a verdict, and answer for it in public. Anyone may challenge their decision, and that challenge has a recipient. What has replaced this mechanism is a procedure in which the voter's qualification consists of a database of tickets registering that they were in two buildings. There is no deliberation, because no one speaks to anyone. There is no argument, because none is requested. And above all, there is no one to answer for the result, because the result is a sum.
This is not a complaint against the public, and I wish to be explicit because the argument is easily misinterpreted. I do not maintain that visitors judge worse than experts. I maintain something different and more uncomfortable for everyone: that an aggregate is not a judgment. When votes are counted, the result is data on what people chose, and it is interesting data. But a prize was not intended to inform us of that. It was intended to affirm something about the works, and an affirmation requires someone to uphold it.
Neither do I defend juries as a virtuous institution. They are also power, and bias, and cronyism, and errors that art history has spent a century correcting. They have awarded what they should not have and ignored what seems evident to us today. But the error of a jury has a property that the error of a count does not: one can hold it to account. Someone signed, someone argued, and for that reason, someone can be refuted. A count is not refuted; it is accepted.
This connects directly with what I have maintained, in a more technical register, in the article I published with Adolfo Cortés García. There we distinguish—and the mechanics are his contribution—between the legitimacy of being in a field, the authority to certify according to its norms, and the power to make an affirmation circulate. A prize functions when all three coincide in an identifiable body. What is happening in Venice this year is that the authority has evaporated and only the last remains: a mechanism that produces circulation without anyone certifying anything. We maintain in that article that the algorithmic regime compresses the intervals in which deliberation used to occur, until registering and affirming become the same act. Here, no algorithm was needed. The oldest institution in the sector has done it by hand, with its own ticketing system.
There is a final episode that rounds off the matter. Some seventy artists from the main exhibition and nearly forty national pavilions requested that their names be withdrawn from the ballot, alleging that the process lacked transparency and accountability, and announced legal steps. The Biennale replied that it would keep all names on the ballot to guarantee the freedom of expression of visitors, although no signatory would be considered for the awards. Thus, the public may vote for artists who cannot win. The gesture of voting is preserved intact, and the consequence is removed. It is difficult to imagine a more precise description of what happens to a recognition mechanism when the organ that made the decision is removed: the form remains, perfectly operational, and inside there is nothing left.
We know, furthermore, that the two systems do not yield the same result. In a United States competition that has for years maintained a public prize and a jury prize in parallel, different works won last year, as is often the case. It is not that one is correct and the other is mistaken: it is that they measure different things. The public vote measures reach, accessibility, and immediate resonance, which are real and valuable things. The jury measures others: formal risk, pertinence, that which perhaps is not yet understood. Calling both things by the same name, and awarding them the same lion, is where the confusion begins.
None of this is a disaster, and it is advisable not to dramatise. It is an atypical edition, resolved with urgency in a difficult situation, and in November there will be two awards that will likely go to worthy works. What I believe merits attention is the ease of the replacement. Eight days were sufficient for a deliberation device with over a century of history to be substituted by a form, and for the question of which works matter to go from having respondents to having a tally. If I defend anything, it is not the jury. It is that there should always exist someone to whom one can say that they have erred.
On open conversation
This text applies to the Venice case a thesis that I maintain in the research on recognition that I share with Adolfo Cortés García: that the decisive factor is not who grants a recognition, but that there exists an identifiable person who answers for it and an interval in which their decision can be discussed. The decomposition between legitimacy, authority, and power that I use here is his contribution. I do not arbitrate the conflict that originated the resignation of the jury, and I do not defend the privilege of expert judgment: I defend the possibility of refuting it. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of curatorship, criticism, biennale management, or the experience of having been a juror, this notebook remains open.
Sources
La Biennale di Venezia. Communiqué of 30 April 2026 regarding the rescheduling of the awards ceremony and the creation of two Visitors’ Lions; voting procedures published on 29 May 2026; announcement of the jury composition, 22 April 2026; historical section on the suspension of awards after 1968 and their resumption in 1986.
Resignation communiqué of the international jury, 30 April 2026, and Statement of Intention of 22 April 2026 (published in e-flux).
Associated Press: coverage of the artists' protest against the voting system, the response from La Biennale on 28 May 2026, and the protests in front of the Israel and Russia pavilions.
ArtPrize. 2025 results: Arras, by Mark Lewanski (Public Vote Grand Prize) and Scraps, by Second Vibess (Juried Grand Prize).
Cras, Sophie. On contemporary art awards as mechanisms of evaluation and valorisation. Critique d’art.
Snell, Ted. On expert judgment in art awards. The Conversation.
European Commission. Declaration of 10 March 2026 regarding Russian participation in the Biennale and the European subsidy. Coverage of the effective withdrawal: The Art Newspaper and Euronews, 21-22 July 2026.
La Biennale di Venezia. Communiqué of 4 March 2026 and official page of national participations (notification procedure for countries with their own pavilion).
Esteban Ruiz, Juan A. Art as Structural Surplus. Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20020706