It's Biennale time here in Venice! And in the garden of San Servolo (now a conference center, no longer the upper-class mental hospital it was when I first chugged past it on a vaporetto decades ago), here are some frogs, waiting to be installed. Alternatively they may be wearing plastic macs against the evening's promised/threatened rain. They are extremely jolly, though not as magnificent as Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant.
Look! There she is, hiding behind everyone's tourist image of gondolas, complete with floating plastic bag and several bottles, on the island of San Giorgio, where the Chini foundation is having a big Quinn retrospective.
And there she is, up close - last seen, in inflatable form, at the opening of the Paralympics in London last summer (I'm not sure if I'm actually right about "last seen," but last seen to the best of my knowledge - and before that, her distinguished appearance on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square back in 2005. The portrait of the disabled artist - looking here like a kind of hermaphrodite Adonis, but a very real person - is stunning. They are installing lights at the base - I can't wait to see her lit up at night.
For all of that, I love walking around Venice seeing what new funky street art has cropped up. Not as startlingly innovative as a few years ago, but here's a great triptych near the station.
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