What Pedrosa offers is a cultural cacophony: proof that we can no longer pretend to live in a monoculture. The show includes three “Nucleo Storico” sections focused on 20th-century works from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. One section is titled “Abstractions,” another “Portraits”: these two genres have often feuded, especially over political efficacy, but here, no aesthetic category is hierarchically favored over another, and no artist is given prominence. Looking at so much art hung salon-style in gray rooms, the viewer is overwhelmed and unsure where to focus, as if attending an art fair. Hierarchy is abolished.

As a result, the underappreciated artists championed here are difficult to adequately appreciate. While the show welcomes overlooked perspectives from under-recognized artists, for the most part, Pedrosa stops short of allowing those perspectives to transform any norms. The “Abstractions” and “Portraits” sections are themed unimaginatively, even conservatively.

The third “Nucleo Storico” section, however, has more teeth. Titled “Italians Everywhere,” it features works as seemingly innocuous as a painting of a shoe by Domenico Gnoli. But taken together, the works are a sly retort to Italy’s current anti-immigration right-wing government, showing that Italians have been foreigners too. The section enlists a radical if historical rethinking of the exhibition format: paintings are hung on transparent easels designed in 1968 by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, herself an expat. She originally designed them for the Museum of Art São Paulo, where Pedrosa is director, to eradicate hierarchy. Taking paintings off the walls, she did away with the chronological and geographic structures that tend to dictate museological narratives, enabling heterogeneous canvases to meld into a single view.

But outside of the “Italians Everywhere” section, there is considerably less melding in Pedrosa’s art salad—which seems to be the point. The artists he has included hardly share a conversation: many work(ed) in contexts that are indifferent to or lack access to academic art training, such as Indigenous communities (André Taniki), psychiatric institutions (Aloïse Corbaz), or regions of the world less invested in the distinction between high and vernacular art (Esther Mahlangu).

One such artist, Santiago Yahuarcani, worked for decades before he began exhibiting outside the Uitoto Nation in Northern Amazonia. His surrealist renderings of humanoid figures, done on tree bark, are some of the best works in the show.

Yet looking at Yahuarcani’s work and at others clearly not envisioned for a viewer like myself, I began to wonder: who benefits most from all this inclusion, and at what expense? Many of the artists in the show are no longer alive, and many have spent much of their careers indifferent to exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, working in other contexts instead. Some addressed sacred knowledge never meant to be shared. In cases like those, are artists—or their communities or heirs—the foremost beneficiaries? Or might it be art dealers and/or well-meaning liberals looking to learn about diverse experiences who stand to gain?

The answer, of course, is that it depends. But throughout, representation and inclusion are positioned as a de facto positive for artists. It’s a notable counterpoint to this year’s Whitney Biennial, a show with its own diverse roster wherein curators showcased artists who have opted for opacity over representation in works that question the ethics of legibility and of being on display.

Throughout “Foreigners Everywhere,” the viewer is asked to learn about perspectives unlike their own, rather than offer aesthetic judgments. With over 300 very different artists, each visitor is bound to encounter work for which they are not the target audience—and for which they lack the adequate context to assess.

Learning, of course, is generally considered a constructive pastime, so long as it does not entail the kind of extractive relations that anthropological exhibitions and World Fairs too often risk. Pedrosa largely shies away from addressing this risk. Instead, he posits inclusion in such an esteemed exhibition as inherently good—never mind the lengthy history of exhibiting institutions conquering the world and then showing off the spoils.

In spite of this, a couple of living artists who are invested in the fraught category that is “art” contributed work expressing skepticism toward this kind of conquering. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger greets visitors to the Arsenale with a giant polyptych. To make the work, the Mexican artist hired her Indigenous family members to embroider scenes onto her painted canvases, calling the act a kind of “semiological vandalism”—poking literal holes in the perceived preciousness of painting as reified by Europeans and contorted to justify white supremacy, as if other cultures lacking painting-filled museums are somehow inferior. Her work is filled with exuberance and rage by way of embroidered lesbian orgies, menacing machinery emitting blood-red clouds, and watermelons showing solidarity with Palestine. Jaeger is too smart and savvy simply to express gratitude for inclusion on the terms of the colonial institution offering it: her work advocates a shift in values instead.

IF PLURALITY IS PEDROSA’S POINT, one palpable side effect is the sense of curatorial box-checking, especially where mediums are concerned. While the exhibition includes some real discoveries in the mediums of painting and fiber—I liked Anna Zemánková, Huguette Caland, and Ahmed Morsi—selections in photography and video feel simply uninspired. Long videos were tucked away at the end of the lengthy Arsenale, where viewers are bound to arrive depleted of time and attention.

Still, the something-for-everyone approach is an understandable reaction to the bad rap that judgment has been given of late. As in so many fields, white Euro-American men have largely controlled the rules of what constitutes good art, and these rules conveniently reified their own superiority, much as the wine-classifying system developed in France continues to proffer that French wine is the best. In response, we are witnessing backlash to the very notion of judgment itself: all biases are problematic, all favoritism passé.

Which is tricky, as historically, discernment has been the curator’s job. Curators are supposed to be aesthetes with finely tuned sensibilities, though this has predictably proven elitist, with the role long reserved for those with access to things like art history degrees and art collections. To avoid this privileged privileging, Pedrosa offers something for everyone: if all aesthetic decisions need to be understood from a particular vantage, then all are valid. In turn, the viewer is asked to play the role of learner, save for the few cases where they feel “seen.” (Art history nerds will recognize this proposition as Warburgian.)

Turning to relativism when dismantling canons or any master narrative is understandable. But it is also less convincing—and more disappointing—than proposing new, more nuanced narratives. The critic Becca Rothfeld describes this kind of cultural egalitarianism as “misplaced” in her new book, All Things Are Too Small, calling it a distraction from the left’s long-held mission of economic equality. In the absence of globally redistributed wealth, she writes, “the democratization of culture is a consolation prize” that “not only fails to make anything happen, but confirms our impotence, our deep recognition that nothing is happening.” That is certainly how I felt while taking in the democratized culture of the Venice Biennale, pounding cappuccinos and looking at art with Trump on trial and a genocide underway.

More than a distraction, cultural egalitarianism is also “wretched,” per Rothfeld. She writes that “the kinds of creatures for whom love and art mean anything at all are the kind with biases and aversions.” To love something passionately, she adds, is to love something else less—or not at all.

There are advantages to certain prejudices. In fact, I thought the best parts of the Venice Biennale relate to the one bias the exhibition reveals: Pedrosa gives outsize attention to fiber art in the works he selected from the 20th century. Works by Susanne Wenger, Olga de Amaral, and Pacita Abad are some of the best in the show. These and other inclusions make a strong case for the formal brilliance of women who were excluded from the canon in their day. Unfortunately, Pedrosa does not carry this thread through to this century, as astonishingly few young fiber artists are included, given the lineage he charts—artists who like Jaeger, might have something to say about the power dynamics at play.

“FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE” HAS RECEIVED few positive reviews. Though I think much of the criticism leans frighteningly conservative, I also find the show hard to defend—and there are worse consequences than a merely OK exhibition. In the New York Times, Jason Farago framed the show as fodder for his repeated claim that culture has somehow ended, now that the internet has enabled us to have many simultaneous conversations that collapse time and space into a cacophony. (That this post-monocultural era also occurs at a time when the art world is more diverse than ever before remains the elephant ever looming in Farago’s room.) Though I think his doomsaying is wrong, I also fear that “Foreigners Everywhere,” with its something-for-everyone, anything-goes approach disguised as democratizing culture, can be contorted to feed agendas like his.

A show featuring artists with a wide range of cultural backgrounds doesn’t have to be a relativistic cacophony: it can be both biased and inclusive. Sohrab Mohebbi achieved this balance when he curated the most recent edition of the Carnegie International, which made a beautiful and inspiring case for political abstraction. The show advocated for ingenious things abstract artists do: adapt to forms of oppression with clandestine messages, respond to vernacurlar patterns and their cultural histories, and give form to essential human emotions. Pedrosa’s breed of inclusion instrumentalizes artists to make a political point, at times undermining art itself; Mohebbi’s made a case instead for the power of artwork—and all the imperfect, slow ways art might engage the political sphere. By contextualizing these engaged abstractionists among coconspirators, he enhanced their impact.

In both shows, it was the artists who did the most inspiring work to grapple with the inherently fraught task of trying to bring non-Western and anti-colonial perspectives into the imperialist inventions that are the museum and the Biennale. A standout in Venice is Lauren Halsey, whose concrete columns tower outside the Arsenale , impressed with reliefs that borrow from the vernacular funk of her neighborhood, South Central Los Angeles. Handmade signs from local businesses, vivacious and full of character, form the trunks; the capitals are sculptural portraits of local friends made monumental. The columns are decidedly Egyptian in style, asserting the foundational contributions of Black culture and forming a continuum between the vernacular contributions of both the ancient society and the artist’s own community.

Halsey does not make Pedrosa’s mistake of trying to uplift vernacular aesthetics for a fine art context which, while endeavoring to flatten certain kinds of hierarchies, can ultimately reinforce them instead. Halsey is clear-eyed about how approaches that may seem egalitarian can also be extractive, neoliberal rather than democratic. She plays the game her way, using proceeds from her work to fund food-justice initiatives in her community and to redistribute wealth. She refuses to allow the powers that be to pat themselves on the back while distracting from the world’s real problems.   

The French polymath Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was never content to work in one mode—and was ostracized for it. His retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is titled “The Juggler’s Revenge”: it makes a case for this versatility, showing a cohesive spirit across works in film, sculpture, collage, drawing, literature, and jewelry.

No bother, Cocteau was unperturbed, impressively juggling this range of media. He inflected even his most commercial films with avant-garde impulses. An excerpt from his 1930 Surrealist film Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) features a handsome shirtless man communing with an anthropomorphic armless Classical sculpture. At one point, the man finds a pair of animate lips on his palm, which he then transfers to the sculpture. The sculpture, now equipped with a mouth, instructs the man to go through the looking glass, so he positions himself along its frame and presses his body against it. Suddenly, he splashes through, as if into a swimming pool, and falls into the abyss.

By 1953, Cocteau served as the jury president for the Cannes Film Festival, a post he held two years in a row. But André Breton, Surrealism’s self-appointed gatekeeper, “despised Cocteau,” the catalog reveals—not on the quality of his work, but on the simple fact that Breton was a raging homophobe, describing himself as “completely disgusted” by male homosexuality.

The show positions Cocteau as a brave forerunner for generations of queer artists who would follow. It opens with a piece not by Cocteau, but by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The gesture, from curator and art historian Kenneth E. Silver, highlights Cocteau’s influence on younger generations (but only in this first room: the other works in this 150-plus-object show are by Cocteau or related ephemera). Made in 1991, the year that Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’s partner died, “Untitled” (Orpheus Twice) features two full-length mirrors side-by-side recalling the Orpheus myth—a long-standing motif in Cocteau’s work. While mourning and with his own premature death looming, Gonzalez-Torres seemingly felt like Orpheus: separated from his lover, the twinned mirrors served as a kind of connection to Ross. Next to the mirrors, we see a clip from Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, which also uses the metaphor of the mirror as a portal—this time, one that takes the protagonist to Hades, where Orpheus seeks to save Eurydice.

Cocteau revisited Orpheus again and again, continually queering the myth. Orphée featured one of French cinema’s leading men, Jean Marais—Cocteau’s lover and muse, 24 years his junior. The artist lived and created authentically, and quite openly at a time when that came at great risk. Surely, this cost him artistic opportunities.

In rough pen-and-ink studies, nude men are rendered as simple line drawings, Cocteau’s detailed draftsmanship reserved for their large erect penises. One drawing shows a sprawling cock leaping off a canvas and into the artist’s mouth, while another, of Tristan Tzara, shows the Dadaist Winnie-the-Poohing it with a set of huge balls. In a Classical reference, Cocteau transforms the snakes that wrap Laocoön into bondage ropes. The work pulsates with desire and anguish.

This cocksure tendency for the explicit extends to Cocteau’s impressive literary contributions, including his controversial Le livre blanc (1928), a short novel that conveys the narrator’s homosexual tendencies. Located somewhere between hot smut and witty social observation, the work appeared anonymously, published only because “its merit far exceeds its indecency,” according to the publisher’s foreword. To the book’s second printing in 1930 Cocteau added drawings, attributed only to the still-anonymous author. Of course, members of his circle knew they were Cocteau’s. In one, two male visages merge into one torso, united by a tender embrace.

Early in Le livre blanc, the narrator declares, “My misfortunes are due to a society which condemns anything out of the ordinary as a crime and forces us to reform our natural inclinations.” While those condemnations may not have totally disappeared today, at least we now live in a time where Cocteau’s vision can be seen from a different angle, refracted back to us from beyond the looking glass.

Never mind—I can’t get the Austria pavilion out of my head. There, in the Giardini, the Ukrainian ballet dancer Oksana Serheieva rehearses at the barre. I watched for a while, mesmerized, before my biennial brain kicked in and asked Why? and What does it mean? I turned, as one does, to the wall text, which informed me that, during times of political upheaval, the Soviet Union state television station would play Swan Lake on a loop, in lieu of regular programming. The gesture was clear: Serheieva, in collaboration with artist Anna Jermolaewa, was rehearsing—for a Russian regime change.

The piece, titled Rehearsal for Swan Lake (2024), captured the absurdity of seeing art—namely, a biennial—while waiting for war and genocide to end. It spoke as well to the ways that art can feel like a frivolous distraction from it all, while also defraying utter helplessness and despair, for those privileged enough. And it evoked, searingly, the absurd ways that grand events rub up against daily life. A number of other works in the pavilion did the same: Research for Sleeping Positions (2006) is a video of Jermolaewa in a Viennese train station, trying to find a comfortable way to sleep on a bench—the same bench she slept on every night for a week in 1989, when she first arrived in Austria before winding up in a refugee camp. Revisiting the bench years later, she struggles to get comfortable: armrests have since been installed to deter sleepers. In another room, we are confronted by The Penultimate (2017), boasting plants that were used as symbols of protest during various struggles. There’s Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution of 2010; Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004; and Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution of 2007, among others. Here, poetic gestures are political, but what is most felt is the gulf between the two. If you like this one, you’ll probably like Poland too.

Walking around, wondering if we were going to war with Iran and how former President Donald Trump’s trial was going in New York (I hear he fell asleep), this Kathy Acker quote, from an essay on Goya, got stuck in my head: “The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense,” she once said. Lots of pavilions felt maximalist, chaotic, absurd—on the lesser end of the spectrum, a handful, especially France and Greece, felt unnecessarily immersive or over-produced. (So many soundtracks. Why?!) I didn’t get the hype surrounding the German pavilion in the Giardini, with its asbestos and its fog machine—but the trek to its second location, on Certosa Island, is worth it; just trust me. In the Arsenale, Lebanon and Ireland are the best, though the latter was too violent for me.

My two other favorites are consensus-approved: Japan and the Czech Republic. In the first, an installation by sculptor Yuko Mohri feels like a Rube Goldberg stop-gap for a crumbling infrastructure, as if someone had asked Rachel Harrison to fix a leak. An elaborate, tube-and-bucket apparatus is punctuated with fruits, light bulbs, and musical instruments; the whole thing channels the kinetic energy of a drip, and harnesses power from unsellable produce in order to produce light and sounds.

In the Czech pavilion, Eva Koťátková approximates the neck of Lenka, a giraffe captured in Kenya in 1954, then taken to the Prague Zoo, where she died two years later. Koťátková’s version is hollow, bisected, and supine; you can have a seat inside. It’s at once adorable and grotesque—which is often how I feel at a zoo (Hi, incarcerated giraffe; It’s awful you’re here, yet I’m so happy to meet you.) But no one could answer the question gnawing at me: is her sculpture made of real leather?

If so, that might be more nonsense than I can bear. (Update: the pavilion’s curator, Hana Janecková, told me that “both the exhibition and the artist… are vegetarian.”) This weekend, I’m off to see Croatia and Nigeria, two pavilions abuzz. Check back—maybe I’ll have something to add, and maybe someone will answer my question about the giraffe.

After I showed up for my appointed time slot—which I booked a week in advance, so that they could run a background check—I had to hand over my phone and my passport before stepping inside. A blue-chip dealer interrupted my security check, explaining his importance to the Italian prison guard, and trying to cut the line; naturally, he was indifferent. Then, an esteemed Italian curator chimed in to remind him that this is a real prison, and those are real police.

The artist-prankster Maurizio Cattelan, of taped-banana fame, is the headliner of this group show. On the boat ride over, I started to wonder if us viewers were going to be the butt of the joke. In a way, we were: I was making fun of myself after thinking absurd thoughts in earnest, like “what do I wear to prison?”—after all, I haven’t visited one since I was a kid. The buildup was so ridiculous that I felt like I was living in an episode of The Curse. Then again, maybe The Curse wouldn’t even go this far.

If you’re familiar with Cattelan’s work, you might be wondering: why did the Vatican pavilion tap the guy who made a sculpture of an asteroid hitting the Pope? It’s a good question, but as far as I can tell, Cattelan isn’t pulling one over on the papacy. Instead, he painted giant feet—à la Mantegna’s Lamentation (c. 1480)—over the prison’s exterior in black-and-white, J.R.-style, for visitors and not inmates to see. This year marks the first that any pope will ever visit the Biennale; Pope Francis arrives next week.

Once we got inside, the ridiculousness faded away as two inmates gave us a moving, sincere tour of the group show installed inside. They introduced works by the likes of Corita Kent, Simone Fattal, Claire Fontaine, and Sonia Gomes, then shared personal stories, too. Of the 80 women incarcerated in this facility—a former convent, built in the 13th century—20 volunteered to become tour guides.

From the cantina, filled with prints by Corita Kent, we walked through an alleyway lined with stone slabs onto which Simone Fattal painted poems, in Italian, written by inmates. Next to the prison’s only window that does not have bars, Fattal laid out postcard versions for visitors to take home with them—we were not allowed to take photos or notes.

From there, we entered the courtyard, where we were instructed not to ask questions or interact with inmates. Some women were chatting as others worked to install a new bench. On the wall, Claire Fontaine installed a blue sign that reads SIAMO CON VOI NELLA NOTE (translation: “at night we are with you”). The phrase is taken from murals that appeared in Italian cities in the 1970s as a statement of solidarity with political prisoners. One of the guides, sharing her own experience of the work—which blasts blue light into their windows—told us that at night, she often lies awake replaying her mistakes.

From there, we were ushered through the playground where children visit their mothers for monitored, contained visits, and I maintained my best poker face among the fancy colleagues on my tour, whom I imagined had no clue what that experience is like. Then, we entered a room with a projection of a video that Margo Perego & Zoe Saldana made with the inmates as the cast and the crew. With dramatic music and in black-and-white, it showed us parts of the prison, like rooms with half a dozen beds, we were otherwise not going to see. Guards stood at the door; there was no coming and going at your own pace. Everyone watched the whole video.

Before entering the final room, a church, we saw a display of works by Claire Tabouret: portraits she made of inmates’ family members, who are on the other side. And in the church, spindly quilted sculptures by Sonia Gomes dangled gently—our guide said she liked them, because they remind her to look up.

These are just first impressions, which I wanted to share because it’s unlikely you’ll get in. As for my interpretations, I suspect I’ll be chewing on those for quite a while.

In “Foreigners Everywhere,” some culturally specific references get lost in translation to be sure, but being represented, and being seen, is framed as a good thing. Some curators might have hesitated to include works made by an artist confined to psychiatric institutions (Aloïse Corbaz), or drawings by a Yanomami shaman done in collaboration with a French anthropologist (André Taniki). Both are interesting works to be sure, but those artists’ inclusion begs questions about the ethics involved in putting their work on display. Who benefits the most from their subsumption into the art world: the maker, their heirs, their community; or art dealers, and/or liberals looking to learn about diverse experiences?

It’s a difficult question—case-by-case, catch-22—and the Biennale’s artistic director, Adriana Pedrosa, didn’t shy away from taking a stance. The show includes lots of works by artists who, in the 20th century, worked in contexts other than the art world—“outsider artists,” the intro text admits in scare quotes. Many of them are Indigenous or self-taught: standouts include Santiago Yahuarcani, and Claudia Alarcón, who worked in collaboration with Silät, a collective of hundreds of women weavers artists from the Wichí communities in Argentina. Their works are shown alongside young, even trendy artists decidedly working for the white cube, like Salman Toor and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

There are a few threads to  Pedrosa’s argument, and the strongest one is in the Arsenale, which is filled with works that blur the line between fiber and painting—pictorial ideas worked out with dye and thread. There, artists draw from contexts, traditions, and techniques outside the West; several didn’t show in, or make work for, museums at all during their lifetime. As the art world grows more geographically diverse, the very idea of “fine art” is expanding too, since after all, it’s a Western construct. While fiber has had a seat at the table for a while now, Pedrosa has introduced dozens of underappreciated examples. Some are better than others—aesthetically, the show is highly varied, with works united by theme and not aesthetic approach. Pacita Abad, Olga De Amaral, Anna Zemánková, and Susannne Wegner all stand out.

This infusion of the vernacular into the realms of fine art and the museum is not without uneven power dynamics. Two artists approach this thoughtfully and self-consciously—confronting inclusion with skepticism, and asking questions about whether the art museum, being a Western construct weighed down by colonial and imperialist baggage, is inherently a good place to be. For me, they steal the show. (They tie it all together, and they bookend it, too.)

One of the very first pieces you see upon entering the Arsenale is a gigantic polyptych by Frida Toranzo Jaeger. After she paints, Toranzo Jaeger hires her relatives, who are trained in traditional Mexican embroidery, to stitch scenes right on top of her canvases. Here, in one scene, a lesbian orgy overlays an idyllic landscape, and this is flanked by paintings of futuristic machinery woven with bondage-like ribbons and grommets. When I interviewed the artist in 2021, she told me she does this because she wants to insert an Indigenous tradition into a Western one, and to fuck with the preciousness of painting, which was reified by Europeans and then contorted to justify white supremacy—as if other cultures without painting-filled museums were inherently lesser. She calls this act “semiological vandalism,” and told me then that, while often and for good reason, Indigenous artists are concerned with preserving cultural heritage against all that has tried to kill it off, she thinks it’s important to imagine decolonial futures, and to carve a space to dream. Embroidery means her canvases have a backside; there, she wrote a message next to an embroidered heart: HEARTS THAT UNITE AGAINST GENOCIDE!

One of the last works you see, meanwhile, are Lauren Halsey’s towering stone-like concrete columns outside the Arsenale. Halsey borrows from the vernacular funk of her neighborhood in Los Angeles—handmade signs from local businesses in South Central, vivacious and full of character—to render these Egyptian-style columns, insisting both deserve pride of place in a continuum of Black culture. The column’s capitals are portraits of local friends, made monumental. Halsey has long expressed skepticism toward the ways the art world can extract from marginalized cultures and communities. So when the Met commissioned a major rooftop installation from her last year, she didn’t let them buy it; instead, she sent it back to her community, to the people it was meant to serve. Similarly, she uses proceeds from work she does sell to fund food justice initiatives in her community, utilizing her proximity to the ultrarich via the art world to redistribute wealth.

Halsey didn’t want the Met to own that piece of her culture like some trophy of conquest—even though of course, that’s precisely what encyclopedic museums were originally designed to do.

“Liminal” is Huyghe’s most elaborate presentation to date, transforming cavernous spaces in the 17th-century Venetian customs house into a series of near-black rooms where various experiments in post-human and trans-species communication take place. The encounter begins with the show’s titular work, Liminal (2024), a huge video screen on which a faceless nude figure moves in response to sensors affixed to live humans standing mutely throughout the exhibition spaces. These movements, we are told, are part of a learning process by which the figure will acquire memories and a language that will evolve beyond human understanding. Elusive as it is to our consciousness, it is hard to know what, if anything, is actually happening.

More accessible is a 19-minute video titled Human Mask (2014). Shot in post-nuclear-disaster Fukushima, Japan, it follows the peripatetic movements of a macaque monkey outfitted to resemble a young girl in a dress, wig, and white Noh-like mask. Scampering through the kitchen and dining area of an abandoned sake house, the creature is the epitome of the uncanny. Its movements resemble by turn those of human and animal, and the expressionless mask invites the projection of human emotions like industriousness, wistfulness, and loneliness. The last is accentuated by intercut shots of the deserted storefronts and streets of the still-off-limits disaster area that give the film a post-apocalyptic ambience.

As it happens, the monkey was trained as a server, and in happier circumstances, had delighted customers at a Tokyo restaurant. Huyghe places the animal in a post-human scenario here in order to complicate assumptions about the distinction between human and nonhuman consciousness and understanding.

A second film, Camata (2024), raises similar questions about machines. Here, the camera pans around and above a human skeleton half-buried in sand, and bearing wisps of fabric from nearly disintegrated clothing. At times, the camera pulls back, and we see a strange machine whose robotic arms endlessly lift and place glass spheres in changing configurations around the bones. The setting is once again post-apocalyptic, this time featuring the arid landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The exhibition website explains that the film is “self-directed [and] edited in real time by artificial intelligence[, using] robotics driven by machine learning …” What we see here suggests a kind of burial ritual for the human species performed by machines that will outlast us.

Other works expand on the theme of nonhuman agency: There is a misty colored-light show created by a “self-generative system” (Offspring, 2018), as well as eerie-looking aquariums in which various small sea creatures live amid cast-concrete forms suggestive of human body parts (Zoodram, 2013). One gallery is devoted to UUmwelt-Annlee (2018–24), a revisitation of the anime character Annlee, which Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased in 1999 from a catalog and that Huyghe and other artists over the years have subjected to numerous permutations.

Annlee is a blank slate, hence an ideal subject for experiments with programming simulacra, among other things, of human-seeming intelligence. Here, Huyghe has created a kind of mind-meld between Annlee and a human subject by reconstructing mental images through a program that links a computer to the brain waves of a person imagining Annlee. The result is a phantasmagoric overlay of quickly shifting shapes and colors that, according to the brochure, are again “endlessly modified by several parameters linked to the surrounding conditions.”

Huyghe urges us to ask: What is consciousness? What is learning? Can machines learn? How do nonhuman creatures think? What would that mean for us? Does anything make humans special? These are questions that go to the heart of the Enlightenment consensus that elevated human reason above all other forms of life and nonlife. Huyghe’s work offers a glimpse of an alternative world where humans have been dislodged from their privileged place. However, the exhibition is not free of unresolved issues. There is for instance a tension between the regulated setup of the museum environment where chance events can’t easily flourish, and Huyghe’s desire to create human-free self-evolving systems. Even more striking is the tension between his vision of a non-anthropomorphic reality and his own role as an artist and creator. While his work centers on the denial of human exceptionalism, it is Huyghe who set these systems in motion. Stepping aside, he seems to adopt a role akin to that of the Divine Watchmaker, who sets the system in order and then disappears, that was critical to Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and other progenitors of Enlightenment thought. So Huyghe’s whole enterprise raises a crucial question: Can we ever really step outside ourselves? The effort to remove ourselves from the world ultimately seems as futile as the effort to show we can rise above it.

This room—an early favorite on critics’ best-of lists, not to mention a hit on Instagram during the opening—is emblematic of Alemani’s curatorial approach throughout the exhibition, characterized by visually stunning, often unexpected pairings of sculpture in the round with paintings or wall-bound works, deftly installed to meet the formidable spatial challenges posed by the Biennale’s main venues. And yet: what does placing Ursuţa and Trockel side by side tell us about either body of work? Mostly that the two artists employ complementary palettes.

Two sculptures by Hannah Levy (foreground) and paintings
from Kaari Upson’s series “Portrait (Vain German),” on wall.

I’ll admit that it feels a bit churlish, after two-plus years of remote viewing, to complain that an exhibition merely looks great. Alemani’s juxtapositions do, after all, tend to flatter the works. Elsewhere in the Central Pavilion, a set of new sculptures by Hannah Levy featuring silicone skins stretched over uncanny metal armatures anchors an arrangement of effaced and distorted figures dissolving into abstraction: Christina Quarles’s raucous paintings of warped bodies and Kaari Upson’s Portrait (Vain German), 2020–21, completed shortly before her death from cancer, a series of lurid, illegible resin and urethane casts of the surfaces of self-portraits she painted in thick impasto. Recent canvases by Jacqueline Humphries that travesty the expressive hand of gestural abstraction in allover compositions, featuring layered patterns of screen static and emoticons, are set against four sculptures from Sara Enrico’s ongoing series “The Jumpsuit Theme” (2017–), comprising pigmented concrete casts of workwear. Reclining on a shared low pedestal, the sculptures suggest both contorted limbs and looping script—and also, curiously, Humphries’s paintings, given their shared pastel palettes, white grounds, and evocations of bodily calligraphy.

Especially strong is the pairing, greeting visitors to the Arsenale, of Simone Leigh’s monumental bronze Brick House (2019) with a suite of black-and-white collagraph prints by the late Cuban artist Belkis Ayón. An eyeless bust of a Black woman whose torso takes the form of a domed hut, alluding to vernacular building traditions from West Africa and the American South, Leigh’s hybrid of body and architecture finds a haunting inversion in Ayón’s repeated renderings of the mythic figure Sikán, the lone woman featured in the lore of the secretive Afro-Cuban religious fraternity Abakuá. Here the princess, said to have been sacrificed for possessing or betraying a secret, is depicted as a dark silhouette whose sole facial feature is a pair of bright white eyes.

While the pandemic put Alemani in the unenviable position of curating the world’s most prestigious exhibition via Zoom, it also afforded her an extra year to plan, enabling impressive logistical coups like a mini survey of Portuguese painter Paula Rego. Many of the selected artists hail from outside the expected art-world centers, and, for the first time in the Biennale’s 127-year history, a small minority of them—21 out of 213—are male. (This is certainly a welcome demographic shift, though I could live without the celebratory invocation of “sisterhood” in the exhibition text.)

BUT HOWEVER MUCH THE SHOW succeeds as a formal exercise, it is remarkably insubstantial as an exploration of ideas, despite the elaborate theoretical and historical framework Alemani has marshaled around her selections. As she explains in the catalogue, the exhibition takes its cues from the mad dreamscape of Carrington’s stories, “a world free of hierarchies, where everyone can become something else, where humans, animals, and machines coexist in a symbiotic relationship that is sometimes joyous, sometimes disgusting.” From this, Alemani extrapolated three main themes—“the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; [and] the connection between bodies and the Earth”—linking Carrington’s Surrealist fairy tales, originally composed on the walls of her son’s childhood bedroom, to other, denser touchstones, namely Rosi Braidotti’s Deleuzian posthumanist texts, Donna Haraway’s by now iconic “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), and Silvia Federici’s notion of “re-enchanting the world,” all of which are cited repeatedly in the catalogue and wall labels.

Untitled drawings, all colored pencil and ink on paper, ca. 2008–2021, by Shuvinai Ashoona.

What this means in practice is a kind of phantasmagoria of the Surreal-ish, the animalesque, and the machinelike, yoking together works in a manner that too often careens between the flimsily pretextual and the didactic and overdetermined. Walking through the galleries, we face an endless parade of mutant, mutating creatures: Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona’s drawings depict encounters between half-human platypuses and walruses chatting in tunics and mittens in the Arctic, while the late Vienna Actionist Birgit Jürgenssen is represented by pseudoscientific renderings of curious specimens, like an insect with the body of a Swiss Army knife, or a sharply attired man with crustacean legs and claws sprouting from one side. Zhenya Machneva depicts anthropomorphized relics of Soviet industry in handwoven tapestries such as Echo (2021), which recasts the gaskets of an old furnace into a face’s gaping maw. Both Marguerite Humeau and Teresa Solar construct slick sculptural fusions of prehistoric fossils and aerodynamic vessels.

Extending the show’s theoretical matrix are five “time capsules” nested within the larger exhibition. These thematic mini-exhibitions of historical women artists are arranged in distinct galleries (designed by the Italian studio FormaFantasma, with colored walls, moody lighting, and plush carpet), and are meant to tease out alternate art-historical genealogies for the Biennale’s contemporary works. In the rambling Central Pavilion at the Giardini, the largest and most central of these mini-surveys, “The Witch’s Cradle,” which Alemani describes as the show’s “fulcrum,” gathers works by women aligned with Surrealism and related interwar movements who play with self-fashioning and the mutability of identity. Alongside the expected names—Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun—are more surprising ones, including the Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage and Josephine Baker, represented by a film recording of a 1925 performance at the Paris music hall Folies Bergère in which she dances a bare-breasted Charleston. “Corps Orbite” focuses on language and feminine embodiment, proposing a provocative, if dubious, alignment between the drawings and writings channeled by late 19th and early 20th century spiritualists, postwar concrete poetry, and Luce Irigaray’s conception of l’écriture feminine. “Technologies of Enchantment,” meanwhile, highlights women Op artists and kinetic sculptors who were marginalized within Italy’s 1960s Arte Programmata movement.

At the Arsenale, where the exhibition space dictates a linear path, two further “time capsules” are more directly situated as precursors to the newer works around them. “A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bag a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container,” occupying a suggestively uterine chamber with curving walls and pink floors, features an array of vessel-like sculptures and objects that range from Ruth Asawa’s undulating wire constructions and Mária Bartuszová’s delicate plaster ovals that recall cracked eggs to 19th-century papier-mâché models of the female reproductive system belonging to the pioneering Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs. Just outside are recent examples of Thai painter Pinaree Sanpitak’s spare renderings of breasts abstracted into the form of bowls, and British-Kenyan ceramicist Magdalene Odundo’s anthropomorphized clay vases.

Untitled sculptures, 1984–86, by Mária Bartuszová.

The final subsection, “Seduction of the Cyborg,” invokes Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg—as a subversive embodiment of boundaries dissolved—to link the avant-garde fascination with prosthetic bodies to the turn-of-the-century figure of the independent, androgynous New Woman. The latter is represented in oblique self-portraits by Marianne Brandt and Florence Henri, and grotesque collages by Hannah Höch. Bafflingly overseen by larger-than-life archival glamour shots of the Dada Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Futurist dancer Giannina Censi, these historical predecessors give way to any number of bizarre contemporary interpenetrations of body and machine throughout the Arsenale: Dora Budor’s “Autophones” (2022), quasi-industrial constructions in wood that cross musical instruments with sex toys; Mire Lee’s Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022), a gory motorized installation of tangled PVC tubes oozing liquid clay; and Tishan Hsu’s synthetic prints patterned with orifices and screens.

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, ALEMANI’S approach is less transhistorical than pseudomorphic, flattening all the works on view into one strange, hybrid form after another. Consider, for instance, Alemani’s impressively humorless catalogue description of Raphaela Vogel’s riotous installation Können und Müssen (Ability and Necessity, 2022), an oversize anatomical model of a disease-riddled penis carted along on a wheeled plinth by a procession of skeletal giraffes: “A world where animals have won out over humans.” Elsewhere, the consequences of that flattening are more pernicious, stripping away any sense of cultural or contextual specificity: numerous works on view show bodies communing and commingling with the landscape, ranging from Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino’s commanding watercolors that depict standing or squatting nude females with knotted roots and vines sprouting from their genitals and extremities to Zheng Bo’s “eco-sexual” video Le Sacre du Printemps (Tandvärkstallen), 2021, imagining erotic encounters between queer men and forest flora, not to mention Delcy Morelos’s room-size installation Earthly Paradise (2022), which envelops the viewer in a muddy sensorium of scented earth. But Paulino’s drawings—particularly the “Wet Nurse” series (2005), several examples of which are included here—reflect on the legacy of slavery and colonialism in Brazil and the ways in which value has been forcibly extracted from both Black women’s bodies and the land, while Bo’s video proposes a radical vision of harmonic interspecies coexistence.

Lingering over Alemani’s presentations, then, is an uncomfortable sense that the works on view exist in a state of generic timelessness. Indeed, the Arsenale even ends with a vision of a return to the garden: Precious Okoyomon’s To See the Earth before the End of the World (2022), a massive gallery transformed into a landscape of flora, butterflies, and gurgling streams, with hulking, earthen figures rising up from the ground, all of which will be progressively overtaken by invasive kudzu as it spreads throughout the installation, offering the hopeful possibility of destruction catalyzing a new beginning. This is, I suppose, the nature of dreams; and given how dismal the world looks beyond Venice, who wouldn’t want to dwell here for a while? But eventually, we all have to wake up.  

This article appears under the title “Venice Biennale” in the September 2022 issue, pp. 12–14.

In his catalogue essay, Rugoff describes a world at a tipping point, with nationalist agendas turning a North Atlantic order upside down; the crisis of global warming accelerating; the disparity of wealth hobbling political reform; and the disruptive force of social media undermining political efficacy. Rugoff, though, is wary of notions about art’s responsibility to reflect its times, and hesitant to instrumentalize the works on view, a position that conversely (and perhaps inadvertently) encourages curatorial libertarianism. He claims the show has no preconceived narrative, but it does have a defining conceit: he chose to exhibit works by the same artists in both the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion, the Biennale’s main venues. It is a brilliantly simple move, making the Biennale an irregular double, as the memory of one exhibition space haunts encounters in the other. Stan Douglas’s two-channel video installation Doppelgänger (2019), on view in the Central Pavilion, encapsulates the exhibition’s modus operandi. A vamped-up, sci-fi drama filled with cinematic nostalgia, Douglas’s work tells the story of twin astronauts separated by light-years and living in different universes. The piece makes reference to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon first theorized by Albert Einstein, in which two physically related but separated particles affect one another. Einstein referred to this as “spooky action at a distance,” a phrase that captures the ineffable relationships that Rugoff has established between the works in both venues.

Rugoff had plywood walls built in the Arsenale that compressed the otherwise vast space. The intervention makes the building more manageable, but also weirdly suffocating. George Condo’s Double Elvis (2019) is the first thing viewers see, its dual figures, rendered in black expressionistic brushstrokes on a silver ground, underscoring the show’s commitment to mirroring. To either side of the first gallery are Anthony Hernandez’s photographs of urban ruins and Soham Gupta’s nocturnal portraits of individuals living on Calcutta’s societal fringes. Toward the back, Zanele Muholi’s monumental photographic self-portraits celebrate her queer, black identity, and in the middle, anchoring the room, closed off from the other pieces, is Christian Marclay’s 48 War Movies (2019), a cacophonous video installation that superimposes war films—all playing simultaneously—in concentric rectangles so the screen resembles a frantically pulsating Frank Stella painting from the early 1960s.

The impact of the first room is jarring: conflict, marginalization, identity, decay. It suggests the beginnings of an argument that will culminate in a definitive statement. This does not happen. Instead, the rest of the exhibition reiterates the first room’s sentiments, at times with a bludgeon. This is not bad, but rather a recognition that biennials with specific theses, developed from gallery to gallery toward a climax, do not make sense in an era in which narratives, politics, and subjectivity are both atomized and essentialized.

The inescapability of technology is reflected in a number of video-based works in both the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion. A bleak horror prevails in Ed Atkins’s installation Old Food (2017–19), which includes digital animations of people inhabiting a gloomy, Cormac McCarthy–esque future-medieval society. Interspersed among the monitors are racks of costumes, transforming the environment into a musty staging ground for a Renaissance fair. Jon Rafman’s video Dream Journal 2016–2019 (2019) visualizes cyborgs and interspecies humanoids coexisting in a dystopian environment made all the more unsettling by the hollow digital animation. Technology, here, is hardly revelatory, and certainly not a source of liberation.

The ubiquity of screens today also informs many of the exhibition’s paintings and works on paper. Tavares Strachan’s installation The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (White), 2018, includes mixed-medium prints layered with graphic and textual elements. The works are part of his ongoing effort to create an alternative encyclopedia for the postcolonial era, but the conflation of different types of visual information speaks to the ease with which individuals negotiate a variety of pictorial stimuli on devices ranging from phones to computers to televisions. The speed with which the culture has assimilated this mode of being and perceiving is hard to overstate. Nicole Eisenman portrays how mundane the digital has become in her painting Morning Studio (2016), which shows two lovers entwined beside a projected image of a Mac computer desktop. 

Representations of subjectivity in flux course through the exhibition. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s dense, flat paintings—domestic scenes and portraits—signal her cosmopolitan identity by mixing depictions of furnishings and apparel from Nigeria, where she was born, with those from the United States, where she lives now. Avery Singer’s paintings, composed with digital 3-D modeling tools, put forth “posthuman” figures that resist binary gender identification, a fluid understanding of contemporary personhood that also plays out in Martine Gutierrez’s self-portrait series “Body En Thrall” (2018), for which the trans artist re-created a Kim Kardashian photo shoot. Jesse Darling’s sculptures, especially the magnificent March of the Valedictorians (2016), a group of plastic school chairs on tall spindly legs, offer surrealist reflections on struggles for disability rights in education. Similar concerns inform Mari Katayama’s photographic self-portraits, in which the artist, who has a congenital disease that led to the partial amputation of her legs, unabashedly displays her body. These are powerful works, at once self-consciously fantastical and erotic.

The best pieces in the Biennale are Arthur Jafa’s The White Album (2018), which rightly won the Golden Lion, and Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS (2018–). These films are gut-wrenching, if, at times, funny. They turn questions of race inside out. Joseph’s BLKNWS reimagines broadcast news from an African American perspective. The clips show narratives that celebrate empowerment and offer positive portrayals of black people in the United States, while the commentators are self-referential and critical. Jafa’s The White Album continues from his magisterial Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016). At forty minutes, though, the work is longer than its predecessor, and does not offer the same aphoristic intensity. Nonetheless, The White Album exemplifies Jafa’s poetic ability to string together found material—often from YouTube clips and other online sources—into profoundly moving stories. Some of the most affecting parts are when a white teenage girl speaks about her anger over black people’s “racism” toward white people; or when a heavyset white man rants in a thick Southern accent about how whites must acknowledge the suffering African Americans endure because of institutionalized racism. Another clip shows a bearded man pulling out from beneath his polo shirt and ill-fitting blue jeans an assortment of handguns, ammunition, and assault rifles. All three segments, and most of the other clips in The White Album, were recorded and uploaded by the people who appear in them. The footage represents one of the most common modes of video production today: a person alone, looking and talking into a digital device, hoping to communicate with someone, somewhere in a different time and space.

This estranged condition resonates with a disquieting aspect of the Biennale: for all of its political sentiments, complex visions of the future, and levels of criticality that instigate serious reflection, much of the work feels self-contained. Most pieces follow their own internal threads to explore issues meaningful to each artist, emphasizing their individuality and subjectivity. One could say the works are alone, alienated to a degree, searching for affinities that, when they arise, feel like “spooky action at a distance.”

Walking through the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion, one cannot help but feel at a weird remove from the economic and political machinations taking place outside, even if these forces support the exhibition, even if this is the theme of some of the art on view. This is a symptom of the neoliberal consumer-driven world, in which people constantly search for new, “authentic” experiences. Even enlightened entertainment can anesthetize viewers. A fateful example is Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra (Our Boat), 2019, a presentation of a shipwrecked vessel that carried upward of 1,100 migrants when it sank in the Strait of Sicily on April 18, 2015. All but twenty-eight individuals perished, most trapped inside the hull. The rusted ship is dry-docked behind the Arsenale and presented without any contextual information. It rests by the water’s edge, in front of a café. How many people have had cappuccinos or taken a selfie without realizing what stands before them?

In the 1990s, before social media was invented, some artists responded to the alienation engendered by late capitalism by turning the exhibition space into an environment in which people could hang out and talk, could do something communal and convivial. Nicolas Bourriaud called this “relational aesthetics,” a term that has come to encapsulate the era’s aspiration toward social engagement, despite critiques that this art was more palliative than political. The way people communicate, gather information, and consume goods today is bound up in the virtual, and much of the art in “May You Live in Interesting Times,” wittingly or unwittingly, embodies this new reality. It does this while simultaneously engaging complex social, aesthetic, and political issues. This could be called “distracted aesthetics,” a form akin to the experience of having a conversation with a friend while at the same time checking email. One is present, but also absent; in the material world, but also the virtual.

Walter Benjamin published his canonical essay “The Work of Art in its Age of Technological Reproducibility” in 1935, the year before Chamberlain offered his curse in the context of rising fascism. Benjamin, too, was well aware of fascism’s encroachment, and he aimed to discern art’s role in the fight against it. Much has been made about Benjamin’s analysis of aura and the power of mechanical reproductions. But his other observations about film, especially the impact of “talkies,” may be most pertinent today. Benjamin thought cinema’s revolutionary quality rested in how ordinary people—not just actors, directors, and producers—understood the medium. They went regularly to movie theaters, and even found themselves in productions as extras. Experts by association, they learned the medium and its permutations while being entertained—developing a form of knowledge that arose from distraction. Cinema was a diversion, but Benjamin hoped it could shock viewers out of their apathy and into a state of political agitation.

Today, distraction is less communal and more individual. More often than projected images seen in large movie houses, “film” is high-definition video viewed on a sideways-turned phone. The question is whether distraction as Benjamin conceived it has radical potential now. Rugoff’s exhibition suggests that the distracted condition that defines our moment has also become a shelter, a way to withdraw and reimagine oneself. His Biennale offers visions of a different mode of being in the process of actualization. But the political struggle central to Benjamin’s notion of distraction, let alone art and any other means, was unable to prevent the horrors of fascism. We are in the midst of seeing what happens this time around.

An ambitious collaborative project filling three floors of the Fondazione Prada in the eighteenth-century Palazzo Ca’ Corner della Regina on the Grand Canal, “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied” weaves the work of German artists Thomas Demand, Alexander Kluge, and Anna Viebrock into a single immersive experience. On view in a series of interconnected spaces designed to evoke either nautical settings or a low-rent hostel, video projections and photographs suggest anxious meditations on memory, aging, and looming catastrophe. The show’s title, a lyric borrowed from Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows,” suggests the ominous tone pervading the exhibition.

Curator Udo Kittleman, who organized the project, describes the show in the catalogue as a “transmedia” experiment, as it merges the work of artists from three distinct creative fields. Demand’s large-scale photos—shots of detailed models of interior spaces that the artist constructs from colored paper—are most familiar to American viewers. Kluge is one of the pioneers of the New German Cinema of the 1960s. A selection of his films shown on large and small screens placed throughout the exhibition constitutes something of a career retrospective. Completing the trio, Viebrock is a designer of theatrical sets and costumes. Her lighting and exhibition design are key to the exhibition’s quirky dramatic effects. The three have been friends for years, but this is their first collaboration.

To help focus the show and inspire his collaborators, Demand sent them a reproduction of a work by Italian painter Angelo Morbelli, Giorni . . . ultimi! (Last . . . Days!, 1882-83), that depicts a large open room of a Milan hostel for the elderly, with downtrodden men crowding long benches and desks. (The original canvas hangs in the exhibition.) According to the curator, Kluge and Viebrock interpreted the scene as an image of retired sailors, as the room somewhat resembles a ship’s dining hall. With finely honed trompe l’oeil murals, Viebrock painstakingly transformed one of the ornate palace’s grandest rooms into the modest open space depicted in the Morbelli painting. Providing one of the show’s most stunning moments, the space features portal windows along one wall and long benches and desks in the middle, which are outfitted with small video monitors showing Kluge films. A tall, narrow smokestack appears to rise along one side of the room. Visitors can sit on the benches, just like the characters in the Morbelli painting, thus participating directly in the show’s theatrical premise.

A number of Kluge’s films are character studies, such as The Soft Light of Makeup (2007), which presents a fictional sequence of actors’ screen tests. These films complement Demand’s photos and videos, which portray public spaces and industrial interiors devoid of figures. A particularly unnerving area of the exhibition features several works by Demand inspired by the control room at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. His photograph of the re-created space, The Skala Computer in Chernobyl (2017), is accompanied by a video documentary about the 1986 disaster at the plant and an installation of video players and other electronic components from the era. Elsewhere, Demand returns to the theme of hopelessness in the face of disaster with Pacific Sun, a riveting 2012 video loop, based on images from a ship’s security camera, showing shifting furniture and objects on a cruise-ship deck during a violent storm in the Tasman Sea. “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied” challenges visitors by casting them as the principal players in a melodrama that seems right for today—full of unsettling, ambiguous images of calamity with few glimmers of hope.

Damien Hirst’s exhibition “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” is like a vast art theme park, a journey into a fantasy world in which myriad mythologies and cultures collide. Arranged across two Venetian museums belonging to the billionaire businessman and art collector François Pinault, the show centers on the story of a freed slave–turned–wealthy collector from Antioch called Cif Amotan II, whose ship—named the Apistos (Greek for “Unbelievable”)—foundered around two thousand years ago with his cargo of artworks, copies, and fakes from diverse civilizations. Hirst, whose own rags-to-millions tale echoes Amotan’s, embarked on the project in 2008, after learning about the ship’s “discovery,” so the story goes.

The show begins in the former customs house the Punta della Dogana, which is situated where two canals meet, the setting providing a fabulous watery backdrop for most of the displays. Here, one finds an array of monumental bronze sculptures—something resembling a giant Aztec calendar, a monk recalling Chinese Buddhist tradition, Greek mythological figures such as Cronos and the serpent monster Hydra, the latter paired with the Hindu goddess Kali—encrusted with barnacles and brightly colored coral. Photographs and film footage showing divers retrieving the objects from the seabed appear to validate the narrative.

The Punta della Dogana presentation also introduces another crucial element of the exhibition: a slew of “replicas,” some purportedly historical copies commissioned by Amotan and others new “reconstructions” produced by Hirst’s team. Room after room is filled with pharaonic busts, medusa heads, unicorn skulls, and sphinxes crafted from marble, lapis lazuli, and rock crystal, alongside vitrines containing weaponry, helmets, armor, coins, and pitchers that bear a patina suggestive of age. Kitschy and often grotesque, the various objects suggest props for some sort of “Game of Thrones”–meets–Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The sheer profusion of items on display prompts reflections on originality, value, greed, and, of course, as in all of Hirst’s work, death and entropy.

Midway through the first venue Hirst unravels the myth with a lurid coral-clad sculpture of himself holding hands with Mickey Mouse. It points up other curiosities and anachronisms on view, such as an “ancient” gold sun disc whose pattern derives from the BP logo, and a sculpture in which the 1990s laboratory mouse grown with a human-looking ear on its back is shown perched atop Apollo’s foot. One begins to realize that this no-expense-spared exhibition might be intended as an elaborate send-up—of museology, of collecting, of the authority of art history and archaeology. This line of inquiry is infinitely more interesting than the luxury art objects, despite their fine workmanship. Hirst, who since his early formaldehyde-preserved animal carcasses has emphasized the theatrical qualities of exhibition display, asks us to reappraise assumptions about fact and fiction, taste, and what distinguishes art from artifact—or junk.

At the other venue, the elegant Palazzo Grassi, the central courtyard barely contains a monstrous sixty-foot bronze-looking resin statue of a headless demon inspired by the figure in William Blake’s painting The Ghost of a Flea (1819–20). The surrounding rooms contain faux-antiqued sketches for works in the show, a model of Amotan’s ship laden with its trove, and numerous small-scale versions of larger sculptures in precious materials such as silver, gold, jade, and malachite likely to appeal to collectors.

Part of the fun of the exhibition is finding the jokes—the vulva adorning the back of a fly-headed, wasp-waisted female statue titled Metamorphosis; the stamp of Barbie-maker Mattel on the back of “Grecian” marble torsos with hour-glass figures; a coral-encrusted silver Transformer toy; a laugh-out-loud bronze bust of Hirst inspired by a portrait of King Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger. One can play spot-the-celebrity too. Pharrell Williams crops up as a marble pharaoh, and Rihanna appears as a red marble Egyptian deity with a nipple stud and tattoos (accompanied by a deadpan label explaining how tattooing was an ancient practice among Nubian dancers and musicians).

In the current era of fake news, this show’s questioning of what is true and authentic feels timely. However, it is never really clear who or what Hirst’s target is—one minute he is king, the next court jester cocking a snook at authority—and his homage to celebrity and the relentlessly commercial quality of his objects undermine any real subversiveness. He has repeatedly averred his belief in the power of art over money, but with him the one is never present without lots of the other. While “Treasures” is a fascinating tour of Hirst’s cultural cosmos and demonstrates that he has not lost his touch as a showman, it never entirely transcends the impression of a slick gift shop for rich collectors, not least due to its link with Pinault, who also owns Christie’s auction house. In so thoroughly overloading the senses, the show hinders the imagination’s capacity to soar.