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The Tirana Biennial has so far made little news, despite its turbulent history. Ann Demeester, a curator for the second exhibition, writes about the unsavoury methods used by Flash Art to make money at the expense of the fledgling biennial.For the unsuspecting soul doing his banking by telephone and over the internet, who reads how Google is growing to be one of the world’s most powerful commercial empires, it seems as though the world economy is becoming ever more virtual, intangible and even conceptual. Financial specialists are speaking more and more frequently about the ‘idea economy’, pointing out that in the information economy of the 21st century, having an idea, combined with the legal right to make a profit from that idea, is one of our ‘most priceless resources’.‘This reality changes commerce and creates new diplomatic fault lines between continents. Some companies, such as Thompson of France, in electronics, and BTG of Britain, in technology, for example, earn more money by selling their ideas than they do by building something themselves. The right to make a profit on a pioneering idea can be so valuable that the battle over the concept is a greater determinant than competing for consumers, as Sony and Toshiba have shown in their war for new-generation DVD patents, long before these DVDs are released. According to James Kanter of the International Herald Tribune (Sunday, 2 October, 2005), ‘patents are becoming the most valuable possessions of every economy’. That certain cultural producers have understood this new law of the jungle – the adage of contemporary capitalism is: he who has the most patents wins – is borne out in a court case filed last year by Giancarlo Politi, overall manager of the Italian art magazine Flash Art, against the organizers of Tirana Biennial III. In 2001, Politi was closely involved in realizing the Albanian capital’s first biennial exhibition. In collaboration with Albanian artists Edi Muka and Gezim Qendro, Politi was responsible for a low-budget art festival in which more than twenty curators and two hundred international artists took part, and which now stands as the very first large-scale exhibition of contemporary art in Albania since the end of Enver Hoxha’s communist dictatorship. The relationship between the organizers on site in Tirana and their Italian co-founder disintegrated after this event – the actual cause is difficult for an outsider to determine – and Politi decided to focus on another region in the Balkans. Partners were sought in Prague, and in 2003, with the cooperation of Tomáš Vlček and Milan Knížák of the Prague National Gallery, a new biennial saw the light of day, this time with thirty curators and 250 participating artists, and which ironically enough acquired the subtitle, ‘Peripheries become the Centre’. A battle over the name, which went virtually unmentioned in the press, preceded the event. In March 2002, Politi and his wife, Helena Kontova, let it be known to Edi Muka that they would be setting up the Tirana Biennial in Prague, an odd instance of geographic dislocation. Heated correspondence was exchanged back and forth. Several confusing and contradictory press releases later, the problem was for the moment settled and the polymorphous exhibition in the capital of the Czech Republic was simply and suitable called the Prague Biennial. But the tale had a sequel, and not just one. The Tirana Biennial survived the amputation in its initial organizational team, and in part thanks to the support of Tirana’s ‘Pop Star Mayor’, artist Edi Rama, alias Regeneration Man, a second, more humble biennial took place in 2003, with the participation, amongst others, of Vasíf Kortun, Hans Ulrich Obrist and myself. After this second Tirana Biennial closed, Politi contacted the patent office in Tirana and in February 2004, registered the trade name ‘Tirana Biennial’, whereby anyone who wanted to make use of this title or any derivative thereof would first have to receive permission from its owner – Giancarlo Politi. In August of 2005, Edi Muka and Gezim Qendro were summoned by Politi’s lawyers and informed that either they purchase the Tirana Biennial trade name or they must immediately cease using. When they failed to reply, they were called before the local magistrate. The lawyers hired by Muka and Qendro quickly discovered that the patent office had made an administrative error. The name had been registered in the name of Gianfranco Politi, instead of Giancarlo Politi. Rumour has it that the former is an Italian prison director who undoubtedly knows nothing at all about the case. Given, therefore, that it was all about a dispute between a Gianfranco Politi and the biennial’s organizers, the whole affair was put out to dry. This absurd situation becomes all the more painful when we recall that in the past year, Flash Art has also begun a hate campaign against their partners at the Prague Biennial. Politi and his cronies also locked horns with former Fluxus member Milan Knížák. Here too, a legal battle ensued over the title ‘Prague Biennial’, with the result that in 2005, two biennials took place simultaneously, causing considerable consternation and confusion among both the public and the artists. Flash Art’s official press releases and newsletters have repeatedly dragged Knížáks through the mud. He is pictured as a power-hungry, arrogant apparatchik who boycotts young artists in his own country and disseminates to the world his outdated ideas about the purpose and the essence of visual art. He is unprofessional and shamelessly abuses the National Gallery in order to promote an artistic legacy of his own.It is alarming to observe that all this seems not to have been remarked on or even to have come to the attention of any of the critical papers or periodicals. There seems to be a collective taboo against exposing misunderstandings of this nature. But doesn’t the proverb have it that by remaining silent, we lend our consent?