KEY POINTS:
A golden crop, a vintage year: that is the main news from Venice, with a better ratio of hits to duds than any biennale in decades.
This is no small matter since the Greatest Show on Earth is now so huge - 800 artists, every continent represented - that it overflows one island and spills through six others, not including the fanciful "occupation" of the city's floating necropolis by two artists demanding last rites for the Swedish monarchy.
But the other good news is that this year's director, the well-respected Robert Storr, has organised such a strong international exhibition that it makes the tortuous miles of the Arsenale count as never before and puts the national pavilions in proper perspective.
Storr's thesis in the exhibition, titled Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind - that conceptualism is the lingua franca of global art - may sound obvious but it's allowed him to group together many giants of contemporary art.
Where else are you going to find Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, and Sigmar Polke superbly displayed alongside the great film-works of Yang Fudong, the droll paintings of Raoul de Keyser and the fabulously groovy portraits of Malik Sidibe, the African photographer who has won this year's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement? (The prize for best pavilion is not announced until October.)
The pavilions themselves are full of surprises. America - shockingly, to some - chose a long-dead Cuban as its representative but the show is perfectly judged.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres' delicate works had always seemed an elegy for the Aids generation but newly retitled they now address an entire country. His cascades of lightbulbs - America - are either fading to the floor or rising in glory.
His lone bird flying through grey mist may be a harbinger of dawn or dusk and his famous liquorice spill - you take one, the art disappears: all that sweet life gone - suddenly seems more like a heap of miniature missiles.
Russia knocked people for six with its half-dozen artists. A coruscating media shower in which zillions of TV images glittered down the cubicle walls was so up-to-speed it featured Gordon Brown alongside Paris Hilton.
The butterfly-effect of Hong-Kong stock exchange riots caused a tidal wave that literally plunged, in its tank, towards you. And the biggest crowd at the Biennale was for a three-screen film combining live actors with superb animations that dramatised Armageddon: trains tumbling from cliffs, teenagers fighting to the death - a cross between Manga movies and Paolo Uccello.
Queues at Venice don't always signify - there were none for the Finnish artist Maaria Wirkkala's boat perilously marooned on a sea of shattered glass, a vision of pure fear - and are often generated by bouncers and hype.
Germany was allowing only 20 people at a time to see Isa Genzken's heavily promoted installation so the bathos was even worse when you got there. Old suitcases and souvenirs, backpacks and wheeled trolleys sprayed silver: a sort of disco apocalypse, everyone in flight I suppose, except that it felt more like a theme-park for rubbish.
It is customary for Germany to address its own past, but the art at the Giardini is mainly in the present tense this year. There are exceptions, of course - Japan's brass rubbings of the station platform at Hiroshima, like ancient headstones, one a year since 1945 - but history is less pressing than humour.
I loved the pseudo-scientific skeletons of Korea's Lee Hyung-koo - Tom chasing Jerry, imaginary giants and whimsical imps based on his experience as "an undersized Asian man" in America. And Iceland has a real humourist in Steingrimur Eyfjord, who has "consulted" an elf to help find a hidden sheep for his magical sheep-pen (which naturally remains empty): a ludicrous odyssey in images and words that sends up the customs of the country.
China was showing films of sacred statues somehow rippling with gentle laughter: everyday miracles. And I don't think Canadian David Altmejd's disenchanted forest was entirely serious: bird-headed men, human-eyed birds, a colossus of broken glass crawling with nasty critters and the whole installation endlessly reflected in mirrors so you kept coming upon yourself with some vile hybrid rearing up behind you.
Surrealism parodied, but by a sculptor with a gift for reconfiguring anatomy; Altmejd is one to watch.
This year's is, alas, a war-time Biennale and this was most apparent at the Arsenale. The propaganda is trite - Christ crucified on a US warplane - but there's artful consciousness-raising too. A former Israeli intelligence officer turned artist has some mordant photographs of soldiers trying, and failing, to grapple with appallingly disfigured dummies.
Emily Prince's sepia-drawn map of dead US soldiers - by colour and state of birth - reveals that the casualties of Afghanistan and Iraq are mainly from the north-east, and not the poor black south.
The Arsenale has the first African pavilion, controversial because it belongs to - and was partly paid for by - a single Congolese collector with allegedly sinister connections, but also because it is so unrepresentatively dull. By contrast, Giuseppe Penone's wonderful gallery at the Italian pavilion nearby is lined with flayed bark and marble carved in ripples that somehow feels like a living skin.
The unluckiest contrast of all is between France and Britain, neighbours among the pavilions. Tracey Emin's show is too weak to peel a grape and certainly her poorest yet.
There are scores more of her rachitic little drawings - the lone agonist centrespread, all vulva and legs, no head - and some pointlessly drippy paintings, plus meaningless witterings in broken wood.
France's Sophie Calle, meanwhile, is at her peak with a marvellously intelligent and inventive show inspired by a rejection letter she supposedly received from a lover.
She sends it to 107 other women - psychoanalysts, private detectives, actresses, mediums, writers - for their interpretation and assembles their responses in words, images and videos.
Like the Glove in Max Klinger's immortal series of etchings, the letter becomes a surrogate person and each woman reveals her own personality in return. Human lives, human hearts are ingeniously expressed through this simple but brilliant conceit and the installation is pure tragi-comedy.
Among pavilions that rely on quick appeal to draw you in, this one is bold enough to resist the rush. You go in for a moment, just to see, and remain captive for hours.
- OBSERVER
