Anish kapoor

I miss the New Labour years, when the government gushed money at cultural initiatives and Britain, previously a backwater in the art stakes, began to look like a serious international player. Sculpture was big and inescapable, and for a brief period it felt as though we’d found our groove: the Italians and Spanish had their old masters while New York bagged canonical modernism; France did both. But, from roughly the mid-1990s to whenever it was that Big Brother stopped airing, we had the best of the new – and ‘the new’, in character, was either ribald, bizarre or monumental. This last register, as executed by the likes of Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, was unashamedly populist but given legitimacy via the pseudo-philosophical rationale of its creators.

Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of it, tucked away, scattered throughout the maze of alleyways and canals. And the art is no longer confined to the Biennale’s national pavilions in the gardens. It has spread, via dozens of tagalong shows cashing in on the presence of the global art world, to a motley array of disused palaces, warehouses, churches, at least one shop and a hidden garden loggia. A good way to sample it is just to follow your fancy: step through an ancient doorway and find out what is on the other side. That’s how I came across a little show by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone in the venerable Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista.