Tobias Rehberger of Germany won the Golden Lion for best artist in the venerable contemporary art exposition, this year entitled "Fare Mondi/Making Worlds." Nauman won a Golden Lion in 1999 for lifetime achievement.
The award for Philadelphia, bestowed by a five-member international committee, confers welcome prestige, and comes after a week of steadily building critical praise.
At a Thursday-night reception hosted by the glamorous Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal, the chic art establishment chatted long into the jasmine-perfumed night - moving pale green mojito popsicles and cigarettes slowly from hand to mouth - about the Nauman show at the 53d Venice Biennale.
"The word I've heard is that you really must see all of it," said Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, about the three-venue Nauman show. Having viewed the portion in the U.S. Pavilion, he said, "It still seems really edgy."
"It looks more avant garde than ever," said ARTnews deputy editor Barbara MacAdam at the Thursday-night bash, the major American social event of the Biennale. "The videos are unbelievably spellbinding."
Early visitors to the Nauman show, or at least parts of it, have included Mick Jagger and Naomi Campbell, and reviews have been affirming.
"Nauman emerges as the big art-historical figure in this Biennale," wrote a critic for Bloomberg. "He's tremendously inventive, with a bleak Samuel Beckett-like vision of existence."
"That mad man Bruce Nauman brings his own particular brand of wackily serious gusto to the usually rather staid looking American pavilion," said The Independent of London.
