We close our eyes and say a prayer, although I don't know who I'm praying to. The Observer When matrons from Florida with the displacement of supertankers wearing fluorescent baseball caps stop to stare at dreadlocked Japanese photographers wearing Minnie Mouse shoes in St Mark's Square, and German transvestites in cute party frocks wait in line for tickets to the vaporetto, you know that Venice is in the grip of its biennial art jamboree. Cruise the Grand Canal and you see the signs of the art caravan everywhere. One fading palazzo has disappeared behind a giant sign that proclaims 'Excentric' and advertises an exhibition titled Africa in and Out of Africa.
Next door is a more discreet sign proclaiming itself to be the home of the Estonian pavilion.
The main action has switched from the Ruritanian national pavilions hiding in the bushes of the city's genteel public gardens into the neighbouring Arsenale. The complex is big enough to lose Tate Modern in, and combines some of the world's most beautiful baroque military architecture with spectacular rough timber-beamed roofs supported by massive carved stone columns. This was the black hole at the heart of Venice, a huge, empty quarter hidden from the rest of the city by endless blank walls, an awful warning of the fate that could lie in wait for the rest of the city as its population dwindled. Now it has become the base for the Biennale's energetic plans to turn itself into an organisation staging shows all year round on architecture as well as art, with theatre, cinema and dance programmes too. This new use is the best hope for the fragile architecture and gives the city a vitality that its ageing permanent population, now below 60,000, finds it increasingly difficult to create without outside help.