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THE ARTS:ALTHOUGH IT IS now but one of 100 or so art biennials, the Venice Biennale is the oldest and still, if just about, the most prestigious, writes AIDAN DUNNE

It’s up to the exhibition director to come up with a theme, and Birnbaum has titled his show Making Worlds. We could interpret this as referring to a moment of global transition, to the need for a new beginning after the general economic collapse and perhaps the end of the Bush era in the US. Birnbaum likes the ambiguity of the term. The phrase has different resonances when translated into different languages, he points out, varying from the metaphoric to the bluntly practical. A work of art, he says, is more than a product, it is “a vision of the world” and hence, figuratively speaking, a means of making a world. But he backs away from any claim to be mapping out an imaginative blueprint for the future. Equally, he doesn’t claim to be summarising what is going on in art at the moment. What he’s offering is a personal perspective.