The 2026 Venice Biennale is, in this sense, a historical document. Not for the works it hosts — which I have not seen and will not see, and I will explain why — but for the débâcle that preceded its opening, and which has revealed with embarrassing clarity the extent to which culture has become, in the lexicon of the progressive West, a continuation of politics by other means.

Let us recapitulate the facts, because here they count more than any commentary. The international jury of the 61st International Art Exhibition announced that it would exclude from consideration the pavilions of Russia and Israel, whose heads of government are subject to arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court. Then it resigned en masse. Twenty-two European Union member states wrote a letter of protest to president Buttafuoco. The European Commission suspended two million euros in funding to the Foundation. The Russian pavilion is present at the Giardini but will remain closed to the public for the entire duration of the exhibition. The opening ceremony was cancelled. Buttafuoco responded by establishing two Visitors’ Lions, voted by the public, open to Russia and Israel as well. Minister Giuli sent four inspectors with a briefcase and seven pages of questions. Seventy-three artists and curators demanded the exclusion of the United States as well.

I have read this list more than once. Each time I feel the same sensation: that of witnessing something resembling the iconoclastic fury of the Reformers, or the socialist realism that decided which works were worthy of the people and which were not — but dressed up as a defence of democratic values. The clothes have changed. The logic is identical.

In the midst of this chaos, one man alone did what needed to be done. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco — a figure of the Italian cultural right, which will make this acknowledgement all the more uncomfortable for some readers — held his ground. Attacked by twenty-two European governments, by his own minister, by the jury that was resigning, by the seventy-three curators who were signing letters, he responded with the only culturally honest move available: he kept the pavilions open to the judgement of the public. This is not a political endorsement on my part. It is the recognition of someone who defended a principle under crossfire, from both right and left. And whoever is attacked by everyone, usually, is right.

The fact that Giorgia Meloni publicly declared that «she would not have made that choice in his place» makes the gesture all the more significant. Buttafuoco did not defend his political side. He defended culture. These are different things. In Italy, distinguishing between them has become an act of courage.

I want to dwell on the strongest argument advanced by the supporters of this line, because it deserves a serious response. They say: the Biennale has never been a neutral space. It is a device for the representation of States. To include a State is to recognise it, to legitimise its political normality. To choose to include everyone is already a political choice. Therefore, no position above the fray exists — there is only complicity with exclusion or complicity with presence.

It is an argument constructed with intelligence. It has its own internal coherence. But it contains a premise that does not withstand scrutiny: that the work of art coincides with the State that finances it. That the artist is their government. That culture is, ultimately, an appendage of political power.

This is the crux of the matter. And it is worth untangling with some concrete examples. Dmitri Shostakovich composed his symphonies under Stalin. Some — the Seventh, the so-called «Leningrad» — were used by Soviet propaganda as a symbol of Russian resistance. But whoever listens to the Fifth today, whoever knows the story of that man forced to recant, to bend, to survive between genius and fear, knows that that music is the exact opposite of propaganda: it is a document of terror suffered, not celebrated. Excluding Shostakovich because he was Soviet would have been obscenely wrong. Including him did not mean approving Stalin.

Pablo Picasso was a member of the French Communist Party for decades. He signed appeals, had himself photographed with party officials, produced the «Dove of Peace» that became an icon of international Communist propaganda. Picasso was also, simultaneously, the artist who had painted Guernica. The two things coexisted in him without resolution. This is what culture is: the place where contradictions are not annulled, but inhabited. Whoever had excluded Picasso from international exhibitions because of his political affiliations would have impoverished the world, not made it more just.

Pablo Neruda was a Chilean Communist senator, a diplomat, a presidential candidate. He was also the greatest poet in the Spanish language of the twentieth century. Both things are true at once. To deny both in order to assert the purity of just one is not ethics: it is cultural illiteracy.

So let us ask this question, and let us ask those who wish to answer it to do so without rhetoric: must we stop reading Dostoevsky? He is Russian. His country has invaded Ukraine. His works are financed — posthumously, of course, but nonetheless — by the Russian culture that Putin claims as his own. Must we close Dostoevsky in inaccessible shelves, as one does with books that burn? And Solzhenitsyn, who was the most illustrious victim of the Soviet regime, who in the Stalinist labour camps wrote what he could not write elsewhere — does he too lapse, by geographical contagion? And Vasily Grossman, who at Stalingrad understood before anyone else what totalitarianism was, and wrote it in a novel that the KGB confiscated because it was too dangerous — must he too be placed in quarantine?

And on the other side: Amos Oz. Abraham Yehoshua. David Grossman. Israeli writers who made the criticism of their own government into literary material, who personally paid the price of dissent, who built bridges with Palestinian culture when governments were demolishing them. Shall we exclude them too? Shall we deprive them of visibility, of prizes, of an international stage, because Netanyahu has an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court?

If the answer is yes — and the logic of cultural boycott leads precisely there — then we are not talking about foreign policy. We are talking about something else. Something that has a name I prefer not to pronounce, because history has already pronounced it enough. Those with memory will recognise it.

There is an episode that comes to mind every time I discuss Wagner and Jewish culture — and which, in this context, carries a specific weight it does not carry elsewhere. I say this with full awareness of being a Wagnerian: it is not an easy confession today, and it never entirely was. Richard Wagner was, notoriously, an antisemite. He wrote it, said it, theorised it systematically. Das Judenthum in der Musik is one of the most objectionable texts ever produced by a genius. His work is traversed by that pathology like a vein of poisoned mineral running through rock. And yet: when in 1882 at Bayreuth the Parsifal was performed for the very first time — the most explicitly Christian opera Wagner ever wrote, a drama of redemption, grace, and the blood of the Grail — who did Wagner want to conduct the orchestra? Hermann Levi. A Jew. The son of a rabbi. Whom Wagner esteemed as a musician above all other considerations, and whom he chose precisely for that work, precisely for that world premiere.

I do not recount this episode to absolve Wagner — I have neither the competence nor the intention to do so. I recount it because it demonstrates something that cultural boycott cannot think: that culture is the place where contradictions are not resolved, but inhabited. Choosing a Jewish conductor for what Wagner considered his most sacred work was decidedly significant. In that gesture there was more civilisation than in all the letters of protest that seventy-three curators have signed against the Biennale. Art does not obey politics — and when it does, it ceases to be art.

I understand the objection. I understand the immense pain of those who have lost someone in Gaza, or who have seen their own city destroyed in Ukraine. I am absolutely not indifferent to those sufferings — I would be a contemptible man if I were. But pain, however legitimate, is not an aesthetic category. It does not determine the quality of a work. It does not establish whether an artist deserves to exhibit or not. And above all: it does not transform a cultural institution into a court of law.

Because that is what the Biennale is being asked to become. A court of law. A place where one does not judge the quality of art, but the criminal record of the government of the country from which the artist comes. A place where the jury does not interrogate the power of a work, but the positions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that financed it. This transformation has a precise name in the history of cultural institutions: it is called subordination. And the subordination of culture to politics has never, in any historically documented case, produced better culture. It has produced propaganda.

I cite the 1974 precedent, which the advocates of boycott at all costs, without ifs or buts, love to invoke: the Biennale closed its pavilions in solidarity with Chile after Pinochet’s coup. Was it a noble gesture? Perhaps. Was it historically understandable? Certainly. Was it culturally defensible? I still doubt it. But it had at least one characteristic that is entirely absent from the current situation: there was a united front, a moral clarity, an identifiable enemy recognised as such by the entire international community. Today, by contrast, we are faced with something far more confused: seventy-three artists demanding the exclusion of Russia, Israel, and the United States. The European Union protesting against the Russian pavilion but silent on the Israeli one. A jury that resigns rather than judging the works. A minister who sends inspectors with a briefcase. A ceremony that is cancelled.

This is not a moral gesture. It is an administrative débâcle with ethical pretensions.

There is also a paradox that deserves to be stated clearly, even at the risk of being misunderstood. In this affair, the side that has historically always claimed to be the custodian of freedom of expression, of cultural pluralism, of openness to the world — the Left, to call it by its name — has aligned itself with closure, exclusion, the suspension of funding, collective letters of protest. And the side that that same Left has always accused of nationalist closure has defended, in this instance, the universalist principle of art above flags. The world upside down. Or perhaps, more precisely: a symptom of how far the contemporary Left has abandoned culture as an autonomous terrain in order to make it an instrument of political combat.

I write this as a socialist — not as a nostalgist, not as a convert, but as someone who chose that tradition with open eyes and continues to regard it as the richest that European politics has produced. And it is precisely from that tradition that my intolerance comes for what the cultural Left has become: a machine for producing proscription lists with a clear conscience.

There is an expression that circulates with increasing frequency in the public discourse of the contemporary left, and which every time I hear it produces in me a chill that is not one of admiration. The expression is: «being on the wrong side of history.» They use it for anyone who does not align with their positions: whoever does not boycott, does not sign, does not exclude, whoever dares to ask inconvenient questions. That person, they say, is on the wrong side of history.

The expression has a precise genealogy. It is not a recent invention: Barack Obama used it so often — in inaugural addresses, at fund-raisers, in synagogues, in his weekly radio broadcasts — that even commentators who were not hostile to his presidency noted the abuse. But the root is older and more revealing. The idea that history moves in an inevitable direction, and that there is a right side on which to stand, is not a conquest of critical thought. It is its abdication. Whoever uses it is not analysing reality — they are pronouncing sentences. And whoever does not align is not wrong: they are simply behind on humanity’s march. It is the exact reversal of Marx’s method: no longer a tool for reading the contradictions of the world, but a faith with its own dogmas and its own heretics.

But here it is necessary to make a distinction that is not academic. I am Marxian, not Marxist. The difference is not subtle: it is abyssal. Marx as an analytical instrument for reading relations of power, economic structures, ideologies — this is something one cannot do without, if one wishes to understand the world. Marxism as a secular religion, as a closed system with its revealed truths and its heretics to be burned — this is something Marx himself would have refused with disgust.

And he refused it, literally. Shortly before his death, in 1882, Marx found himself in Paris and met Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue, and other leaders of the nascent French «Marxism.» What he saw scandalised him: his analysis reduced to a catechism, dialectics transformed into dogma, the complexity of reality sacrificed to the purity of the formula. The response he gave, in a letter to his son-in-law Lafargue and later made public by Engels, has become one of the most quoted — and most ignored — phrases in the history of political thought: «Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi, je ne suis pas marxiste.» What is certain is that I am not a Marxist.

There is the point. Whoever today uses the expression «wrong side of history» with the confidence of a prophet places themselves precisely within the tradition that Marx repudiated: that of Marxism as secular eschatology, as absolute certainty about the meaning of history, as licence to condemn whoever does not align. This is not Marxism. It is its most dangerous deformation — the one that produced, in the twentieth century, the consequences that everyone knows and no one wishes to remember.

The cost is being paid by all of us, and we are paying it literally: two million euros in European funding suspended, an institution entering its most important edition already mutilated, a jury that does not exist, an award ceremony postponed by six months. But the highest cost is not measured in euros. It is measured in that principle — fragile, painfully acquired over centuries, more than once nearly lost — according to which culture is a territory where flags are left outside the door.

I have decided not to visit the Biennale this year. It is not a political gesture — that would be paradoxical, in light of everything I have written. It is a gesture of sadness. I do not wish to see an International Art Exhibition that has already renounced itself before it has even opened. I do not wish to walk among the pavilions of an institution that has accepted — under financial pressure, under political pressure, under the pressure of seventy-three signatures — to become an instrument of European foreign policy. I do not wish to give my presence to something that betrays the name it bears.

Venice has always been, in the history of European culture, the place where differences met without annulling one another. A city built on the border — between East and West, between water and land, between commerce and beauty. For centuries the port where goods were exchanged alongside ideas, where the Venetian merchant sat beside the Ottoman merchant, where the Serenissima maintained its independence from both Rome and the continental powers, with the pragmatic shrewdness of one who knows that culture is too precious a good to be sacrificed to the politics of the moment. The Biennale was, in its original conception, an extension of that vocation: the world showing itself to itself through art, in the conviction that art says something that politics cannot say. That conviction is what we are losing. And we are losing it at the hands of people convinced they are defending something precious.

Ray Bradbury imagined a world in which books are burned not out of hatred, but for hygiene. Not to destroy culture, but to protect it from contamination, to preserve social peace, to prevent certain ideas — dangerous, uncomfortable, morally unacceptable — from continuing to circulate freely. The firemen of Fahrenheit 451 are not monsters. They are functionaries. They have principles. They believe in what they do.