This thesis examined how international art events such as La Biennale di Venezia constitute spaces of intensified neoliberalism and urban privatization, with concrete effects on public civic life, while paradoxically functioning as a site where publics are constituted and redistributive claims are articulated. The work aimed to build upon preexisting literature on tourism-linked urban financialisation by intersecting it with the construction of urban spectacles through cultural governance and the effects of public space. The ambition is to be able to apply theories developed within urban tourism studies more vastly by bypassing binaries of tourist/resident and high/low quality tourism, as well as to inquire the effects on the political potentialities of our urban environments dealing with quickly shifting demographics and geographies. Despite the city of Venice being a primary subject for tourism studies, few critically analysed the Biennale, and fewer inquired on the effect of urban financialisation industry on public space. When the entire city seems subsumed by a neoliberal, privatising tourist spectacle, how do populations continue to organise for concrete redistributive justice ?