Urban Space and Aesthetic Pleasure

As art biennials increasingly become a global phenomenon, the connection that they represent between urban space and aesthetic pleasure warrants attention in comparative light of two among the newer wave of bi-annual art events: Berlin Art Biennale and Jerusalem Art Focus. Both these events start their operation in mid-1990s, run through their fifth edition, and engage urban space across divisions and connections. Both for Germany and Israel, 1989 serves as a cut-off point in their national history as a significant part of their population has memory of living in the Soviet block countries. In the 1990s they have esperienced liberation, mobility and integration in the framework of democratic Germany and Israel respectively. Both Berlin art biennial and Jerusalem art focus represent differently positioned responses to globalization of economy, society, politics and culture. Economic operation across the globe took increasing recourse to networks. Tourist, investor and labor flows became more mobile. Regional and global summits increasingly integrated into political decision-making. Cultural production, media distribution and communication channels received growing global exposure. Both Berlin and Jerusalem have their Western and Eastern parts that have significant histories of autonomy. Different lines of historical connection and rupture that traverse the urban spaces of Berlin and Jerusalem provide rich source of historical comparison of how art events focus these multiple lines of perspective on their locations.

In this paper I argue that contemporary cities find art biennials among their more paradigmatic spaces that define contemporary philosophical understanding of urban modernity. For this reason I attempt to draw the lines of connection between Italian contemporary philosophy, as represented by Mario Perniola, and German classical social and cultural theory, as represented by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer. This interdisciplinary paper orients itself to the discussions taking place in theorization of space and sociology of cities. As opposed to Benjamin's seeing in Paris a capital of the nineteenth century, and there are voices that maintain it is a capital of the twentieth century as well, I explore the possibility of thinking paradigmatic cities and sites of modernity in plural. In this case, Berlin and Jerusalem figure in my discussion of alternative modernities in the context of the connections between urban spaces and global culture that these cities establish through art biennials. In their contemporary, globalized form, art biennials are a new phenomenon that breaks with assumptions of aesthetic expertise and restricted access, as the exclusivity of Venice biennale or Kassel documenta implies for each of their participating countries. This opens an opportunity to consider the relations between urban space and aesthetic pleasure in their comparatively particular and theoretically general aspects respectively.