I reflect back to 1910, when the artists gathered in the Piazza San Marco for the Venice Biennale nearly 100 years ago, the Futurists fiercely demanded their independence, hurling their now famous leaflets:

“We repudiate ancient Venice, exhausted and ravaged by centuries of voluptuousness… We want to heal this rotting city, magnificent sore of the past… Let us fill the stinking little canals with the rubble of the tottering infected old palaces. Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for idiots, and raise to the sky the majestic geometry of metal bridges and smoke crowned factories, abolishing the drooping curves of ancient buildings. Let the reign of Electric Light come at last, to free Venice from her venal hotel-room moonlight.”

The Biennale dismissed that day of protest, but they could not dismiss the spirit of the Artist!