The Biennale wrapped up over the weekend and they’ve released their visitorship figures to satisfy your craving for numbers. They’ve put it down to 912,897, which surpassed the organisers’ target of 650,000. According to the release, that’s broken down into 196,028 for indoor/admitted visitors; 696,709 “outdoor” visitors to The Merlion Hotel and National Museum of Singapore; and 20,160 visitors of “auxiliary and pre-opening events”. If one remembers the other newspaper’s criticism about attendance figures midway through the event, it went “unless there is a stampede in the next few weeks, the final visitor tally may fall short of the 650,000 target.” Their figures for this edition are way above 2008’s 505,200 and 2006’s 883,300. Well, maybe there was a stampede during the final few weeks. Nudge nudge wink wink. Of course, figures are mediated indicators. It may only be telling one part of the story (The Merlion Hotel, of course, will attract a lot of people). But I’m not taking this away from the organizers – the other Biennale editions also had their respective eyeball-drawing works. I only hope that the 900k figure was calculated in the same manner as the previous Singapore Arts Festival, which featured a drastic drop because of their new way of qualifying what counts as a “goer”. I hope SB2011 didn’t tick anyone who just happened to pass by the Merlion Hotel on their way to Starbucks. That said, the release had no mention at all of Simon Fujiwara’s Welcome To The Hotel Munber fiasco. It would seem strange in the light of SB artistic director Matthew Ngui’s statement where the list of activities and the actual exhibitions “not only solidify Singapore‟s image as an international hub but even more importantly, that Singaporeans were able to experience a major cutting-edge international exhibition of contemporary art as good as any other on this planet in their own country. Curatorially, SB2011 remains generally free from the shackles of any specific individual institutional agenda and this signifies a maturation of Singaporean society into a more open and inclusive place to live in, which I hope will continue.” (Emphasis mine) The Fujiawara Incident will be an extremely sore point in discussions revolving around the Singapore Biennale 2011. But I wouldn’t completely take away from the organisers the effort and hard work that went into this event. For a greater part of this whole experience, kudos to everyone. PS, One other thing though. How come the release only listed in their Annex responses from “International Media and Art Writers”? Local media and arts writers not worth mentioning isit? ;)