In 2012, veteran curator and frequent biennial director René Block delivered a keynote lecture at the World Biennial Forum in Gwangju, one of the first such globally networked forums dedicated to thinking about the past, present, and future of biennials (and which, needless to say, was also intended to take place biennially).¹ During his presentation, Block argued that contemporary artists had escaped dependency on the ever-accelerating art market through the artistic freedoms offered by the biennial circuit. We have been arguing the contrary: that dependency on the ever-accelerating art market and the artistic freedoms offered by the biennial circuit were entwined and, at times, mutually productive while at other times bitterly divisive. The growing shift towards artistic play and education programs at biennials for children, such as the astonishingly popular Kids APT at the Asia-Pacific Triennial, was merely the tip of the iceberg in contemporary art's postcritical populism at one end of the spectrum, with political activism at the other. Biennials adopted populist and activist politics and reveled in the imperative that contemporary art be critical, cosmopolitan, experimental, networked, and memorable all at the same time. Yet this inconsistency risked uncertainty about biennials' intentions and resources, and the kinds of angry artist boycotts over corporate and state sponsorship that threatened the biennials at both São Paulo and Sydney in 2014. Biennials were in no way separate to the workings of the art market, nor to broader corporate interests and operations, and became less so over the period that this book has described. That was one of the narratives that evolved between the 1950s and today.

Two main questions overlapped across the course of this book. What was the impact of biennials on contemporary art? And how did biennials change in the course of the appearance of contemporary art? At this point we will sum up the issues that we saw played out in different biennials across the period. We worked through a typology of biennial formats, noting that each appeared in turn as an answer to a set of problems and contingencies, whether these were artistic, political, or economic, but always in relation to globalization (a process that we carefully distinguished from globalism, as the desire to be recognizably global).

In chapter 1, we encountered Harald Szeemann's documenta 5 of 1972. documenta is the flagship of surveys of contemporary art. documenta 5 was the first meta-exhibition, and Szeemann perhaps the first star-curator (or auteur curator). He self-consciously re-created documenta not as a simple survey of art, nor as the means to link Germany to modern art once more, as it had been founded to do after the tragedies wrought by Nazism, but as a site where cultural and political change would be described and debated, so that biennials became cultural laboratories. This was a momentous shift in curatorial ambition, but one that also bracketed the place of art within a curator's field of vision, somewhat to many artists' dismay.

Chapter 2 examined the two most durable examples of the Second Wave of biennials, the biennials of São Paulo and Sydney. At the 1979 editions of each, local artists and activists wondered if a globally focused biennial that nevertheless avoided real change and substantial local connections was worthwhile. At a time when regional artists were working in a cultural geography of destabilized but still crushingly hegemonic center/periphery relationships, both biennials were conflicted in their relationships with local artists. The 1979 Biennale of Sydney, however, saw two innovations: it dispensed with organization by nationality and it experimented with the tropes of collaboration and cross-cultural exchange that were to become later so important in biennials.

In chapter 3, we focused on the important South–South history of global biennials preceding the biennials in Havana, in the decades prior to the 1980s. We located their long history in the postwar arc from decolonization to an emergent globalism from 1955 on, and understood the landmark 1986 Bienal de La Habana within that resistant stream of cultural, art-historical, and international reconstruction.

Chapter 4 looked at the institution of the regional biennial, in particular at the Asian biennials of the late 1980s and 1990s that surveyed the region for the first time, revising our understanding of the relationships between nascent formulations of “globality.” During those years at the end of the Cold War, the complex histories of each nation's art, each with very different and separate modernisms, were combined to try to define an Asian contemporary art. But it was no accident that these exercises in regional self-definition were mounted in two nations – Japan and Australia – at the periphery of Asia with troubled relationships to the region. The two triennials that we focused on, at Fukuoka and Brisbane, were self-consciously historical and synthetic, melding the signifiers of both tradition and contemporary history.

Chapter 5 addressed the late-1990s appearance of biennials at sites of crisis or in their extreme aftermath, through which biennials navigating the “edges” became necessarily political in nature, either promoting political agendas or searching for new ones. We looked at the European Union creation of a nomadic biennial, Manifesta, to bridge the post-Cold War divide between Eastern and Western Europe, and equally to heal the split between Europe and North Africa. From there, we saw the fragility that attended a new international biennial in a traumatized and economically fragile location, specifically during the period immediately after the end of apartheid in South Africa, and finally described an extreme form of a small biennial, one that was completely itinerant and which adopted an adversarial relationship to the biennial circuit: the Emergency Biennale in Chechnya.

In chapter 6, we looked at another, epochal documenta, at Documenta11 (2002). Its director, Okwui Enwezor, produced a meta-exhibition across various sites, not just in Germany, in which each was called a Platform. Enwezor's exhibition had both activist and scholarly aspects: he demonstrated that the idea of an avant-garde was never simply something of the North Atlantic center. This was also an exhibition at which it became clear that globalization had prompted an unparalleled curatorial specialization in which internationally focused curators such as Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Charles Esche, or Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev now exercised an unmatched authority over contemporary art's discourse. In a stream of early twenty-first-century biennials across the globe, they, like Enwezor, attempted to redefine the existing canon of modern and contemporary art, ranging backwards and forwards rather than across the terrain of the present and, at least as important, redefining their audiences' engagement with art itself as something entangled with politics and geography through complex public programs that merged with the exhibitions themselves.

Chapter 7 returned us to the original art biennial, the Venice Biennale. But with the 2003 Biennale, we looked at how Venice, locked into its original format of national pavilions chosen by each nation and augmented by increasingly large and important survey exhibitions chosen by the director, adapted to the changes in biennials that we have been describing, in the conjunction of two modes of curating that were themes throughout this book: biennial directors' delegations of authority through collaborations with other curators, and the power of star-curators. The 2003 Biennale, self-consciously “globalist” rather than cosmopolitan in its selections, had been preceded by another biennial in Tirana that road-tested this unstable curatorial combination, with unexpected and problematic results.

In chapter 8, we described the post-Great Recession shift after 2008 towards a peripheralism, or “world art,” inclusive of art and experimental practices from around the world but structured by a curatorial corps of biennial curators. The term, “experimental,” was widely used, especially in China, to stand in not just for an avant-garde but also for a social laboratory. The term, “peripheralism,” suggests how biennials resolved the problem of catering to two geographically differentiated audiences, two artistic groupings, and two art worlds or realms: the local, regional, and peripheral on the one hand, and the “international” (though, in reality, primarily North Atlantic) on the other. These two types of art world intersected at each biennial that we examined, but though they remained differentiated from each other they became less and less easily distinguishable, since globalization produced and actively sought site-specific, “local” results rather than the broad-brush effect of homogenization. Moreover, after the Great Recession, we saw that biennial networks began to present an image of contemporary art's globalization that was highly conflicted: at the same time as local images and contexts were constantly threatened in biennials with the fate of being subsumed into globalized economies, so biennials also became sites – sometimes self-consciously and self-critically, other times cynically – for the analysis of those economies' seemingly all-consuming force, and protests against their power.

So, how had biennials functioned in the construction of contemporary art? They had created and enabled a world-picture of art that was globally networked without necessarily being a mere handmaiden to globalization (for servant status was one of the risks associated with the globalist yearnings of biennials) and which was entwined with the motifs of laboratory-like experimentation and global peripheralism.

We observed the gradual development and vast expansion of a complex, internally differentiated public for contemporary art that flocked to biennials worldwide in search of – and finding – communal, highly social experiences of experimental art that were, at the same time, spectacular and intimate. We saw that biennials began to appropriate the signs of politics, of teams, and of experimentation, matching these to a conventionalized idea of artistic imagination that was, in effect, postcritical and peculiarly spectacular, by which we mean that biennials became very public contexts for spectacular audience intimacy.

But simultaneously, and against the reign of cynicism that this might imply, biennials moved beyond the survey model that the Venice Biennale had invented, evolving into whole new modes and experimental forms. The global embrace of neoliberal capitalism had not precluded dramatic developments in the critical, self-reflexive curatorship of contemporary art. Curators, more than art historians, were now reformulating art history along global lines.²

What gave biennials their popular reach, but also their agitations and their imagining of alternatives? The answer, clearly, was located in the social realm (and in the constructed conviviality) that biennials inhabit. More specifically, it lay in the exceptional new history of curatorial innovation that answered the evolution of this environment of itinerancy and movement, rather than in the aesthetic or the technological domains per se, though both were continually inflected with the desires of artists, curators, and even civic leaders to map a sense of regional connectedness. Ultimately, to be connected meant to be in biennials or to produce them. It was these exhibitions, rather than individual art works that successfully changed the (contemporary) art world as well as changed the way we think about cultural experience. For as we increasingly saw, the economic globalization that enabled biennials at the same time depended on extravagant conglomerations of international and local artists. This was linked to the ability of capitalism to cohabit with authoritarianism and neoliberalism, masking control with the spectacular. There was no need for political convergence towards freedom, as Ai Weiwei's experience in Shanghai, in 2000, and then later, demonstrated. As we observed early in this book, a scattered, restless, expanding, globalizing art world internalized the conditions of the experimental as an alternative to both the traditional and the perpetual avant-gardist, having re-identified and recycled these conditions as contemporary. Biennials then sublimated both provocation and intervention so that, by the early twenty-first century in some parts of the world, they now resided as the signifiers of a constructed and childlike intimacy. It was an ingenuous intimacy that substituted symbolic power for social affect and yet admitted genuinely critical art, in particular after the 2008 Great Recession, into its spectacular midst. Across the world's biennials, this had been cynical, pragmatic, and idealist, all at once.

From the 1950s onwards, it had largely been through biennials that the possibilities and problematic issues of modern and contemporary art have appeared with the most urgency. It had been through biennials, above all, that a new aspect of contemporary art, the curatorial, has appeared, together with new typologies of exhibition-making. Since 1972, it was through biennials, triennials, and documenta that contemporary art migrated from its often hermetic, often politically reconstructive, avant-garde and experimental origins into the realm of the spectacular, garnering global public attention to contemporary art. And as we are seeing now, in the early twenty-first century, biennials may also be leading the reconsideration and reconstruction of art's histories towards properly global narratives.