Why Art Matters: The Political Power of Art and the Russian Pavilion Everyone Is Fighting Over

A Pavilion Stays Empty, or Art as the Backdrop of War

Some images stick with you. One is the reed-green Russian pavilion in late-tsarist style in the Giardini of the Venice Biennale. Alexey Shchusev built it in 1914 (he later designed Lenin’s mausoleum). It has stood empty since February 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine.

Shortly after, curator Raimundas Malašauskas and artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov withdrew their contribution to the 59th Biennale. In protest. The pavilion door stayed shut, and inside: nothing. And that nothing said more than any exhibition could have. 

In 2024, Russia didn’t show up at all. But Moscow still wasn’t ready to give up the Venice stage entirely. Russia handed its pavilion to Bolivia. The political backdrop was a lithium deal with the South American country. Officially, though, Russia cast itself as a champion of the anticolonial struggle, even as its war against Ukraine entered its third year. Art as a backdrop for foreign policy: that was impossible to miss.

What Can Art Do, And Who Gets to Show It?

For the first time since the invasion, Russia plans to run the pavilion itself again at the 61st Biennale, opening May 9. The project The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky, involving around 40 artists, is explosive: Russia named Anastasia Karnejewa as curator, daughter of a deputy general director at the Russian state conglomerate Rostec, which sits on every EU country’s sanctions list. She co-founded her company Smart Art with Ekaterina Winokurowa, the daughter of Foreign Minister Lavrov. 

The protest came fast: 26 members of the European Parliament from different factions demanded in an open letter that the Biennale leadership exclude Russia. The EU Commissioner for Culture, the EU Vice President, the Italian Ministry of Culture and, of course, the Ukrainian government all sharply criticized the move: participation was incompatible with the EU’s collective response to Russian aggression. The EU is now reviewing whether to suspend an ongoing two-million-euro grant to the Biennale. 

The Biennale leadership under President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco pushes back: the Biennale has run for 130 years, and censorship has no place in it. He wants to keep the exhibition open to every country in principle, from Russia to Israel to Ukraine.

Italian politics plays an especially awkward role in this dispute. Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli explicitly distanced himself from the Biennale leadership’s decision. Yet Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni herself put Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco in office in 2023.

That opens up a fundamental conflict. And at its core, it comes down to one question: what can art do? 

What Power Does Art Actually Have?

If a pavilion in Venice meant nothing, no one would fight over it. Instead, it mobilizes politicians, ambassadors, and million-euro threats. That’s the best proof of art’s power.

Not unlimited power, mind you. Art can’t stop wars. No painting has ever halted an army, no play has ever toppled a dictator. Asking that much of art does it no favors. The real question is: what can art do that other forms of expression can’t?

The answer: art forces us to look. It gives us context, pushes us to think harder, to inform ourselves. And at its best, it leads us to a well-considered judgment of our own. That sounds modest. It isn’t.

A look at history makes this especially clear, I think. Whenever those in power feared art, they knew exactly why.

“Degenerate”: When Dictators Fear Images—and How Far Those Power Will Go

The Nazis feared art. In 1937, they organized two exhibitions in Munich at once. In the newly built Haus der Kunst, which Hitler had constructed specifically for this purpose, the Great German Art Exhibition opened on July 18 with art that matched his worldview: heroic bodies, idyllic landscapes, clear forms. One day later, on July 19, the exhibition Degenerate Art followed in the cramped rooms of the Munich Hofgarten, showing over 650 works confiscated from German museums.

These were Expressionist, abstract, Dadaist, and Cubist works, art that couldn’t be read in naturalistic terms or in the sense of Nazi ideology. Nolde, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Klee, Beckmann, Grosz, Marc, Dix, and many others were pilloried, and their work was smeared as “Jewish-Bolshevik,” as diseased and hostile to the people. The placement was no accident but a strategy: the art branded degenerate was meant to look cramped and chaotic, while the “German” art in the grand new building next door was presented large and dignified. 

The Nazis knew this: images shape attitudes, attitudes shape societies. Whoever controls the images controls a piece of reality. If they’d thought art was powerless, they wouldn’t have bothered.

Pollock, Rothko, and the CIA: Abstract Art as a Cold War Weapon

After World War II, this calculation flipped. During the Cold War, the US deliberately promoted Abstract Expressionism as a cultural weapon. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler were exhibited internationally, not just as art but as proof of freedom, individualism, and the West’s cultural superiority over Soviet state art. Formal freedom became an export product. The CIA was behind it, and Nelson Rockefeller funded the effort. The artists themselves knew nothing about it.

This showed up most clearly at documenta II in Kassel in 1959. Shortly before the opening, huge crates arrived from New York packed with 144 paintings, a who’s who of Abstract Expressionism. The monumental American works dominated the show, and organizers dropped the original idea of a true international survey. The political plan worked. You can read more in my article CIA, Art, and the Cold War: documenta II 1959.

Guernica Covered Up: Maybe the Most Striking Example of All

And then there’s Picasso’s Guernica. The massive painting, which immortalized the 1937 German bombing of the small Basque town, hung as a large-scale tapestry in the UN’s New York headquarters. Specifically, right at the entrance to the Security Council chamber. For over 35 years, generations of politicians and journalists walked past this image, which shows the misery of war in black and gray: screaming mouths, a dead child in a grieving mother’s arms, a horse whinnying in pain.

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell stood before the UN Security Council to justify the coming US war in Iraq. And just for that moment, the tapestry was covered with a blue UN flag. An antiwar message didn’t fit as the backdrop for a war announcement. 

The irony is almost too much! Of course, art couldn’t have stopped a war here either. But it’s still remarkable how aware the US administration was of that particular image’s power, and how carefully they avoided any clash between the broadcast image and the Secretary of State’s message. Read more on Guernica and its up-and-down history at the UN in my article Guernica: Picasso’s Antiwar Painting Removed from the UN.

Symbolic Politics on the World Stage

Back to Venice. The Russian pavilion sat empty for two years, then someone else took it over. Now it’s set to be run by Russia again, staffed by elite daughters and organized by a Foreign Ministry official. That’s not neutral cultural exchange. That’s symbolic politics.
And that’s exactly why the debate runs so hot. The question isn’t whether the project on display will have artistic merit. The question is: what does it mean to give a state waging an illegal war of aggression space on one of the world’s most important international art platforms? What does that say about the institution handing out that space? Art alone can’t answer these questions. But for millennia, it has been a place where we ask them.

What Art Can and Can’t Do: A Conclusion

When regimes ban art, when governments cover up tapestries, when culture ministers threaten to pull funding, it’s clear that art matters. The Russian pavilion in Venice isn’t a neutral contribution. It’s an arena for symbolic politics. 

In the end, visitors will have to decide for themselves what to make of Russia’s presentation in Venice in 2026, how to read it. As visitors, we bring our own knowledge, beliefs, and doubts to every pavilion like the ones from Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, China, or Iran. Art becomes the place where all of it comes together: it moves us, or it makes a stance visible where words fail. And that, exactly, is its real strength. At its best, art doesn’t leave us alone. It questions us, and our conscience.

Why Art Matters: The Political Power of Art and the Russian Pavilion Everyone Is Fighting Over – britta kadolsky