Contemporary art biennials are booming; there are now over 50 of these mega-shows worldwide.

Unlike art trade fairs like Art Basel or the Armory Show, where dealers and galleries pay to exhibit, biennials tend to be government-funded, centrally curated and designed to put the host city on the map. On any given day of any given year, an art biennial is being staged somewhere in the world, attracting its own nomadic tribe of curators, connoisseurs, collectors and curious locals. But what would it be like to spend an entire year going from one to the next?

Well, congratulations! You've won a place on the Art Biennials Mystery Tour! Cancel all your appointments and grab a toothbrush, it starts right now!

Your first destination is sunny Tirana, Albania. The Tirana Biennial 3 is themed around "Sweet Taboos," but don't expect passé taboos like sex, drugs or money; here in Tirana what's taboo is standard organization. They're running the show backward, with the opening party and catalog at the end. If you think that has more to do with running late than subversion, well, keep your cynicism sweetly taboo, please!

After Tirana you're off to Venice, the elegant grandmother of all modern biennials, founded in 1895 at the height of what critic Ulf Wuggenig calls "the age of the gold standard regime ... the belle époque of globalization."

This year Venice has two female curators, María de Corral and Rosa Martínez. The theme is "Perpetual Genius," but don't worry, you're not in for room after room of Great White Males.

The first thing you'll see at the Arsenale is 1970s-style agitprop from the Guerrilla Girls, then lots of video art made by emerging artists from emerging places. It's a pity Gregor Schneider's daring plan to turn the Piazza San Marco into Mecca was rejected by the Venetian authorities. But the granny of all biennales still has teeth.

There won't be much time to hang around Venice; you're off to the second Beijing International Art Biennale in China. Its theme is "Contemporary Art with Humanistic Concerns." That sounds good -- one in the eye for critics of China's human rights record!

The Beijing curators seem to know where you've come from: "A lot of narrative and symbolic works of excellence have emerged, which have broken the convention of the Venice Biennale paying attention to the video art. That method of image viewing is comparatively time-consuming and doesn't leave a deep impression on viewers."

So Beijing has hung a lot of paintings in its biennale. Whatever style they're in, there's a certain socialist realism about the curators' final statement: "When art is attracting attentions of various circles, it is a good chance for enterprises to gain business opportunities, to expand industries and to enhance reputation."

While we're in Asia, let's swing by the third Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, then the Yokohama Triennale, where the art this year is presented inside packing cases in two huge working warehouses down on the dockside, just in case you need to be reminded how closely the global trade in ideas relates to global trade itself.

Then there's just time to catch the end of the Gwangju Biennale in Korea, where "60 non-artists, from fashion designer Muiccia Prada to British farmer Ross Cherrington" have picked the artists. After that break from art -- well, from art picked by art curators, anyway -- it's back to Europe, or rather a city that may one day be in Europe, if Turkey meets the EU's membership criteria: Istanbul.

At the Istanbul Biennial, the curators have invited artists to live and work in the city for several months. "The sites are an apartment block, an old customs storehouse, a former tobacco depository, a gallery, a shop, a theater and an office building.... The walk between these venues should also be seen as a part of the biennial experience."

Those art walks should get you fit in body and mind for your next destination: France, and the eighth Lyon Biennale. Curators N. Bourriaud and J. Sans have selected "Experiencing Duration" as their theme. They seem to mean time travel.

"This 2005 biennial buzzes with the experimental spirit of '70s counterculture," they write. "Our interest here is ... in the hippie experience as an attempt at a counterculture, a laboratory of new forms of living. Indeed those years of emancipation and wholesale questioning of the status quo seem to contain, in a still-virulent form, all the problematics of the early 21st century: feminism, multiculturalism, the struggle of sexual minorities, 'new age' spirituality, identitarian and relational experience, ecology, orientalism, decolonization, psychedelicism.... But above all, they constitute a model for rejecting the consumer society."

Rejecting the consumer society while stimulating the local economy sounds like having your cake and eating it. But if you feel guilty about your global shopping spree, remember that you'll come home laden only with concepts: multiculturalism, ecology, orientalism, decolonization and the rest. It certainly saves on excess baggage charges.

If you're feeling tired or anxious, we can skip the first Luanda Triennial in Angola, happening between March and May 2006. It would be a shame, though; since the demise of the Johannesburg Biennale in the late '90s, Africa has been woefully underrepresented.

But you are looking a bit tired, and we haven't even gotten to the airport yet. So what do you say we head straight to the fifth Santa Fe Biennial, curated by Robert Storr? Or even cut that and just catch the Whitney Biennial in New York, curated by two Europeans, Philippe Vergne and Chrissie Iles and titled, relaxingly, "Day For Night"?

We did have you booked back to Europe for the fourth Berlin Biennale, curated by Italian maverick Maurizio Cattelan. But seeing how exhausted you look, let's send you straight to the ninth Havana Biennial, followed by the Sydney Biennale (Dr. Charles Merewether, the curator, "is currently writing a book on the cultural history of looting," says the blurb). Then, of course, there's the trendy Sao Paolo Biennial in Brazil.

What's that? You want to cut this whole thing short? But you can't, there's still the Busan Biennale in Korea and the Singapore Biennale, which "seeks to reposition the dreams, desires, conflicts and catastrophes found throughout Central Africa, Middle East, South Asia to Southeast Asia, Pacific Ocean and South America, highlighting the artistic practices and discourses that are relevant to the multiplicities of cultural morphing, examined in tandem with the currency of economic flux and influences within each region."

You're not in the mood for art? Well, there's always money: The Singapore Biennale, says its website, "will coincide with 'Singapore 2006: Global City. World of Opportunities' ... the annual meetings of the Boards of Governors of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group."

Wait, no, don't go! There's still the Liverpool Biennial, held September to November 2006 in Liverpool, England. Yes, Liverpool, hometown of The Beatles.

Think of them, sitting there on the dockside of their declining post-industrial city in their caps and winklepickers, waiting for cultural goods to arrive from America -- "race" records, Little Richard! Think of them learning the chords, the riffs, the lyrics, changing those songs around, re-exporting them to the world in the form of a Beat Boom ... and in the process reversing not just the fortunes of their town, but of their homeland itself.

Yes, culture can save a city, and art can change the world. Stay with the Mystery Tour!

By Momus