Through his spokesman, Mayor Nutter called the prize "a tremendous achievement for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and for the city of Philadelphia. Recognition like this shows that Philadelphia continues to be a world-class city."
Tobias Rehberger of Germany won the Golden Lion for best artist in the venerable contemporary-art exposition, this year titled "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 came after a week of steadily building critical praise.
At a Thursday reception at the glamorous Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal, the chic art establishment was chatting long into the jasmine-perfumed night - moving pale-green mojito ice pops and cigarettes slowly from hand to mouth - about the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Bruce Nauman show at the 53d Venice Biennale.
The exhibit spans three venues, and "the word I've heard is that you really must see all of it," said Adam D. Weinberg, director of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Having viewed the third in the U.S. Pavilion, he said, "It still seems really edgy."
"It looks more avant garde than ever," ARTnews deputy editor Barbara MacAdam said at the Thursday 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."
