Two of Europe’s most celebrated cultural institutions imploded in the same season. The Venice Biennale opened its 61st edition without a jury, without prizes, and with protests outside the pavilions of three different nations. Eurovision turned 70 with five countries absent and thousands of demonstrators in the streets of Vienna. The coincidence isn’t accidental. It reveals something structural about where culture sits in geopolitical life.
The Biennale Without a Jury
The 2026 Venice Biennale opened in what multiple outlets described as its most chaotic edition in memory. The five-person jury resigned before the exhibition even began — an unprecedented act in an institution that has run since 1895. Their departure came after they announced they would not award prizes to countries whose leaders face charges at the International Criminal Court. That position isolated Israel and Russia simultaneously, and the Foundation’s leadership declined to act on it.
What followed was a cascade. Italy’s culture minister boycotted the event. More than 200 artists, curators, and workers signed an open letter demanding Israel’s exclusion. A further letter extended that demand to the United States over its involvement in the war in Iran. Russia’s pavilion — permitted to return after its absence following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine — faced protests from Pussy Riot activists in pink balaclavas. Ukrainian co-curator Ksenia Malykh told reporters plainly: “They say that art is beyond politics, but they are using art as a weapon in a hybrid war in Europe.”
South Africa’s pavilion stood empty after its artist refused to edit her work to remove tributes to a Palestinian poet killed in Gaza. Australia’s artist was dropped by the country’s official arts body and then reinstated. Without professional jury awards, organisers replaced the Golden Lion with a public vote — which prompted one Ukrainian artist to observe that the Biennale had effectively become Eurovision.
Eurovision Turns 70, Minus Five Countries
The comparison landed with some force. Eurovision, 70 years old in 2026, faced its own institutional crisis in Vienna. Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain all withdrew from the contest after the European Broadcasting Union voted at its December 2025 general assembly to allow Israel to compete. Their reasoning ran along similar lines: the EBU had excluded Russia in 2022 saying its presence would “bring the competition into disrepute.” The same logic, they argued, applied to Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Over 1,100 musicians and cultural workers signed an open letter. The 2024 winner, Swiss singer Nemo, returned their trophy to the EBU. Spain, one of the “Big Five” countries that contributes the most to the contest’s finances, joined the walkout — a significant economic signal. The EBU held its position. Israel performed. The contest proceeded.
An expert on Eurovision history described it to NPR as “one of the most serious crises that the organisation has ever faced.” The 70th anniversary, designed as a celebration, became a referendum on whether a musical competition can remain apolitical in a world that has decided it cannot.
The Collapse of Cultural Neutrality
These events share a logic that goes deeper than their specific controversies. For most of the post-war era, international cultural competitions operated on an explicit fiction: that art, music, and cultural exchange existed in a separate register from foreign policy, that national pavilions and song contests were spaces where countries could meet outside the terms of their conflicts. That fiction performed real work. It enabled participation across political divides and created a category of interaction not governed by diplomatic calculus.
The fiction is now collapsing. The same forces that produced Stadiums Are Becoming Extensions of the State — governments using access to desirable spaces as compliance leverage — are running in reverse through cultural institutions. Where stadiums let states enforce obligations on citizens, cultural events now let citizens and institutions enforce obligations on states. The mechanism is the same: access to something people want matters, and the terms of that access have become political.
The EBU’s position on Russia in 2022 was the inflection point. Once an institution excludes a country on political grounds, it establishes that the space it governs is not truly neutral — that political criteria exist and can be applied. The question that follows is not whether those criteria exist, but who applies them, and to whom.
Art Cannot Be Beyond Politics If States Pay for It
Part of what makes both crises structurally interesting is the role of national funding. The Venice Biennale is built around national pavilions, largely funded and curated by participating governments. Eurovision operates through public broadcasters accountable to national political cultures. Neither is a purely independent cultural institution — both are, at their structural core, vehicles for state participation in international cultural space.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, excluding the Russian state pavilion was relatively straightforward: the state actor had committed an act of aggression, and cultural infrastructure funded by that state was a legitimate target for symbolic isolation. The complications arose when the same logic was applied to other states by artists who aren’t official representatives of their governments, and to institutions — like the EBU — that have their own political constraints and commercial interests.
The Biennale jury resigned rather than navigate that contradiction. The EBU chose not to resolve it. In both cases, the institution’s inability to establish a clear and consistent principle created exactly the political theatre that the neutrality claim was supposed to prevent.
Cultural Institutions Are Now Sites of Geopolitical Argument
The pattern here connects to a longer shift in how culture functions in public life. As explored in Stadiums Are Becoming Extensions of the State, the idea that cultural and sporting spaces exist outside political logic has been steadily eroding. States use them. Artists use them. Movements use them. The question was never whether culture is political — it always was — but whether the institutions governing it could maintain a credible pretence of neutrality.
The 2026 Venice Biennale and Eurovision answered that question definitively. The pretence no longer holds. What replaces it isn’t yet clear. What is clear is that international cultural competition now operates on the same terrain as international relations — with the same fault lines, the same actors, and the same unresolved questions about who has standing to decide what norms apply.
Key Sources
- CNN – The Venice Biennale Is Imploding and Russia and Israel Sit at the Centre of the Crisis
- NPR – Protests and Boycotts Rock Prestigious Venice Biennale
- Times of Israel – Venice Biennale Previews in Chaos, Overshadowed by Israeli and Russian Participation
- Foreign Policy – Eurovision 2026 Controversy: What the Contest Reveals About the Global Order
- Al Jazeera – Why Is Israel Allowed to Take Part in the Eurovision Song Contest?
- NPR – At Least 4 Countries Pull Out of 2026 Eurovision Contest Over Israel’s Participation
- Le Monde – ‘Pariah’ Pavilions Spark Controversy at Venice Biennale
- The Guardian – From Eurovision to the Venice Biennale, Culture Contests Are Struggling to Channel Globalised Politics
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