The greatest art show on earth returns next month to one of the world’s most beautiful cities. This will be the 53rd Biennale di Venezia (June 7-Nov. 22) since the event was founded in 1895.

To describe the Venice Biennale as an exhibition isn’t so much an understatement as a complete misunderstanding: It’s a vast empire of art, with exhibitions large and small, national and international, spread all over town and out into the lagoon.

The section under the control of the director, this year Daniel Birnbaum, fills warehouses originally built to supply the Venetian navy throughout a lengthy war. That’s only one part of it. Among the national representatives, the biggest name is the American Bruce Nauman, godfather of Britart and originator of many current avant-garde ideas (he was making art in neon long before Tracey Emin, for example).

This time, to add to the confusion, the German representative is British -- Liam Gillick -- a move that is a sneaky bit of conceptual art in itself, undermining nationalism. The artist in the actual U.K. Pavilion, meanwhile, is the film and video maker, Steve McQueen.

To see the whole Biennale, whose sponsors include Italy’s largest utility Enel SpA, requires at least a week, and the most assiduous contemporary-art movers and shakers will hop over the Alps to Art Basel (June 10-14), the leading contemporary-art fair and dauntingly colossal to boot.

Royal Academy

Back in London, meanwhile, there’s the world’s oldest contemporary-art show, the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition (June 8-Aug. 16), held every year since 1769. With a mere 1,000 plus exhibits it’s no more than a canape in comparison with the feast in Venice, yet it’s still quite an undertaking to view with thoroughness. This year’s innovation will be a room devoted to film and video art.

Among the season’s non-mega attractions, Tate Britain is offering a retrospective of work by Richard Long (“Heaven and Earth” June 3-Sept 6). Long’s work is hard to classify -- some takes the form of minimalist sculpture, some of mud applied to the wall with the primal vigor of a Jackson Pollock, some text, some photographic. A safe bet is that the result, in the grand upstairs galleries at Millbank will be beautiful.

Over at Tate Modern, there is a survey devoted to “Futurism” (June 12-Sept. 20), a movement that broke on the world a century ago when its first manifesto -- a paean of praise to speed, violence and modernity -- was printed by the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro in February 1909.

Futurist Nude

The Italian futurist painters such as Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini were old-fashioned Post Impressionists in many ways and didn’t entirely live up to their propaganda. This exhibition will consider them side by side with their French, Russian and even British contemporaries.

Among the exhibits will be some celebrated works, including Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912), a study of a figure in motion that created a furor when first shown in the U.S. -- one critic compared it to “an explosion in a shingle factory.” This promises to be the most art-historically meaty of the London summer shows.

The most popular, on the other hand, may well be the Royal Academy’s retrospective devoted to J.W. Waterhouse (“The Modern Pre-Raphaelite” (June 27-Sept. 13). “The Lady of Shalott” (1888) by Waterhouse is one of the best-selling postcards at Tate Britain, which bodes well for visitor attendance.

The British Museum, meanwhile, is celebrating an “Indian Summer” a little earlier than usual. Outside in the courtyard there is an “Indian Landscape,” created in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (through Sept. 27), and in Room 35, “Garden and Cosmos,” an exhibition of 17th- to 19th- century paintings from Jodhpur (May 28-Aug. 23).