Just as Paris' arcades seemed to be marginal to the scholarly attention in Walter Benjamin's times, art biennials only begin to receive a more central place in social scientific research together with a larger cultural-turn in urban and metropolitan studies. Mapping in their intermittent geography configurations of relations that stretch from local to global scale, these events offer a possibility to raise a question on the conditions of their possibility, the beginning of which is coterminous with the rise of modernity itself. Universal expositions, art museums and commercial warehouses all contribute to the special institutional lineage that lets an aesthetic perspective on the conditions of possibility of modernity in its present form arise. One answer to whether it is possible or not to make for other cities, or even for contemporary Paris, counterpart studies to Benjamin's Passagen-Werk may be Harvard Project on the City that advocates for a similar methodology for accumulation of knowledge through fragments and impressions. This approach appears to follow the post-structural call for intensive science that develops novel and complex conceptual instruments for the processes that cause cities to take the form they do. Charged with theoretical nostalgia for many places, art biennials style themselves as intensive events that no aspiring metropolitan city can fail to stage.

As the international stage of art biennials gets ever denser with participants, it is the theoretical research on modernity, aesthetic and experience that their comparative research allows to conduct. However tentative the process of learning from Benjamin's Passagen-Werk can be, its pairing with the contemporary developments in European philosophy and sociology does promise to create a secondary layer of scholarship on the urban importance of art biennials. Jacques Ranciere's discussion of the distribution of the visible, for instance, brings the connections between sociology and philosophy to bear upon the aesthetic practices. Mario Perniola connects contemporary art to contemporary experience and philosophy while drawing attention to their interrelations. Manuel DeLanda continues in the steps of the path-breaking post-structural works of Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Connections between these strands of European contemporary thought can be sought with German sociological theory of the classical period, such as that of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer and Max Weber. These foundations should allow a specifically urban writing to arise that would provide an account of art biennials adequate to their theoretical bearing on the contemporary understanding of modernity, aesthetics and experience.

My scholarly mission I see as consisting in exploration of how contemporary theoretical developments apply to art biennials as paradigmatic events of the present moment. On the urban level, where art biennials take place, more than just issues of visibility, representation and discourse is at stake. Not all cities are privileged yet to have an art biennial of their own. Not everywhere the importance of cultural sector is equally recognized. Not in every country the basic rights and liberties that make free expression possible are recognized. The process of globalization of art biennials while far from being uncontroversial is an important cultural development that needs a resonance that goes beyond press reviews and video clips. Only thus will art biennials be able to play roles that are instrumental to the discussion of urban rights, collective reconciliation, and global civil society. To pull art biennials out of their ephemeral status of time-limited events, it is necessary to do both their in-depth studies and international comparisons among them. Few frameworks fit this task better than a start of scholarly career as a post-doctoral fellow. Additionally on-line publishing, blog platforms and international organizations make exchange of ideas, up-to-date reporting and global collaboration possible as never before.