Bringing the Funny

Felix Salmon submits:

When my wife Michelle and I go to see art, the highest praise we can think of is often "that's really funny". A sense of humor is not necessary when you're making art, but there's a long and impressive history of pieces which are very strong and also very funny. A lot of the YBAs (Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst) incorporate humor into their works, helping to propel them to worldwide fame, and sometimes an artist can achieve a lot of success with weak work just because it's funny (Tom Otterness). And Maurizio Cattelan, of course, has become a bona fide art-world megastar almost exclusively through the use of humor.

At the Biennale this year, humor was in great demand, because so much of the art on show dealt with grim subject matter: war, assassination, oppression, poverty, torture. Happily, Dan Perjovschi was there at the entrance to both the Arsenale and the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini, to help lighten the tone a little – not that he's not capable of imparting some very serious messages as well. (New Yorkers might know Perjovschi from his piece in the MoMA atrium; these ones were better.)

But the best piece using humor to interrogate the serious themes of the exhibition was "Discussion (Property)", by the wonderful Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov. Based on an intellectual-property dispute between Russia and Bulgaria over who owns the copyright to the Kalashnikov rifle, the piece is both hard-hitting and very funny – and even manages to teach us all something very important about yogurt.

Solakov also has two magnificent pieces in Documenta: "Fears", a series of 99 captioned drawings which is frequently hilarious, and "Top Secret", an important early work where Solakov details his involvement with the Bulgarian secret police in the early 1980s.

Good art is powerful art, and sometimes humor can pack a lot of power. Robert Storr, the curator of the Biennale, clearly knows this, programming not only Perjovschi and Solakov in the Arsenale but also installing a huge room by Jason Rhoades in a rare instance of a deceased artist making it into the show. The artist might be dead, but his humor lives on.