If you want to know how the definition of “scandal” has changed with the decades, you couldn’t do much better than to see “Taking Venice,” Amei Wallach’s highly enjoyable and revealing documentary about a legendary uproar in the art world. The film chronicles what happened at the 1964 Venice Biennale — the exhibition of contemporary art, held every two years, that culminates in the awarding of an esteemed grand prize. At the time, the Biennale was considered to be a kind of art-world equivalent of the Olympic Games. Not just artists but the nations they represented were jockeying for cultural supremacy. In the ’50s and early ’60s, the grand prize often went to the French (Matisse, Max Ernst, Georges Braque), but in 1964 the U.S. decided to mount a campaign of “cultural diplomacy” in the hopes that one of its own artists — Robert Rauschenberg — would win the Biennale.

Rauschenberg’s mixed-media paintings, known as “combines,” were dazzling and insurrectionary. They were three-dimensional in every way: They jutted out at the viewer, they deliriously juxtaposed image and abstraction, and they busted down the door to the pop-art revolution. They were bold and exquisite. U.S. bureaucratic officials didn’t pretend to be art critics, but even they knew what they had. They saw that an artist like Rauschenberg was on the cutting edge of an aesthetic new wave, and that his paintings could say something about the kind of country America was becoming.  

The U.S. wanted to use art as a proxy to assert its global dominance (in no small part to fight the Cold War). It was comparable to what went on during the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, which were viewed, by the U.S. and Germany and by the world at large, as a literal and metaphorical showdown between two ways of life, with the Black track superstar Jesse Owens embodying the American ideal, and the runners of Nazi Germany standing in for Hitler’s racist fantasy of a physically superior Aryan nation. (You might say that Owens’ triumph presaged the defeat of Germany in WWII.)

Yet the 1964 Venice Biennale wasn’t just another international contest. The event marked a paradigm shift: the overthrow of Paris as the center of the art world, and the movement toward a new age in which New York and its freewheeling American stars (Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol) would now hold sway.

At the Biennale, the U.S. backed Rauschenberg with a massive promotional campaign, one that the movie, at times, flirts with labeling a “conspiracy.” Everyone there knew that the Americans were throwing their weight around, working vigorously to do everything within their power to win the grand prize. But did they do anything underhanded? Not really. No palms were greased; no external political pressure was exerted. It was more a matter of press releases and one memorable party. The figures who colluded in pushing for Rauschenberg included the American art curator Alice Denney and the silky-smooth Alan Solomon, director of the Jewish Museum, who put the exhibition together. They were joined by the fabled art dealer Leo Castelli, who already had no peer when it came to working the room, and Castelli’s ex-wife, Ileana Sonneband, who had opened her own gallery in Paris, where she remained in partnership with Castelli. They were all working, in their way, to bring the news: that the American art revolution was the new royalty. The Harvey Weinstein Oscar machine of the ’90s would have approved.

“Taking Venice” is, in part, a portrait of Rauschenberg, and he’s mysterious and charismatic enough to make you want to see a biopic about him. The young Gary Oldman, with his sexy smirk, would have been perfect casting (and Oldman could still play Rauschenberg in middle age). Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, both gay, had a very similar clean-cut mystique, and they became romantic partners. Johns, with his targets and flags, was part of the 1964 Biennale exhibit too; the film gives us tantalizing hints of their complex camaraderie.

Within the PR, there was a notable quirk. Each nation’s artists were exhibited at a separate national pavilion in Venice. But the American pavilion was deemed too small and shoddy (which, in fact, it was). So it was arranged for Rauschenberg’s paintings to be displayed in the stately American consulate, a building that wasn’t, at that point, even being used. But when it looked like he was on the verge of winning the grand prize, a mini hullabaloo ensued. Had the Americans broken the rules? Would Rauschenberg be disqualified because his paintings were being displayed in the wrong building? The seven members of the jury were divided on the issue. It was the sort of tempest in a teapot that takes on a global significance, like spending six months deciding the shape of the table to be used to negotiate the end of the Vietnam War. At the last minute, barges were brought in to move Rauschenberg’s paintings from the consulate to the American pavilion. So now, the paintings were in the right place. But was this a scandal?

“Taking Venice” is a very good documentary, though with a hint of pearl-clutching. There’s a “We were shocked, shocked…” undercurrent to the whole thing. There are talking heads, like the art scholar Hiroko Ikegami, who suggest that the win by Rauschenberg was “engineered.” Yet the grand irony ­— and, you might say, the grand joke — of the 1964 Venice Biennale is that no rules were broken, and that the Americans were accused of using aggressive PR tactics (which they did) to push the artist who overwhelmingly deserved to win. “We didn’t cheat,” says Alice Denney. “We had a goal. As all countries did.” Imagine that Paramount Pictures was accused, in 1972, of mounting a relentless campaign for “The Godfather” to win best picture. Maybe they did. But if so, who cares?

Okay, I get it. The art world of 1964 was a far more civilized and decorous place. It didn’t do public relations. But that’s part of what was changing — and that, in a way, is the true fascination of “Taking Venice,” that it captures the moment when the art world, in thrall to the electricity of the new Americans, changed its spots. The critic Irving Sandler points out that the art market as we know it didn’t even exist until 1958, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” for $30,000. Art had not yet come together with media.

When it did, at the Biennale, everyone was jolted. The same way they were jolted by the very idea of Warhol’s paintings, which made art and media into the same thing (and then did something 1,000 times as audacious: found incandescence in that fusion). You could say that the U.S., at the Biennale, engaged in art-world propaganda. But another way to look at it is: Has there ever been a more righteous U.S. propaganda campaign? We were backing the right horse, and for the right reason. It was the one with the most beauty.