Dispatches from the present
People keep asking me the wrong question about my visit to the 61st Venice Biennale of Art. They want to know, “Was it good?” Before I attempt to answer, let me give you a brief list of the highlights, and you can decide for yourself whether the word “good” could describe them:
I carried a twelve-pound baby doll around a set circuit, changed its diaper, scanned a QR code inside the diaper, read on my phone that the baby had been born in 1955 in Indonesia, and then was prompted, “Would you like to read a poem written for this baby?” which I then recited aloud. (The Japanese pavilion.)
I watched a video of a porn star brushing another porn star’s teeth with a toothbrush held in her mouth, then I walked into the room across the hall and beheld eighteen trapezoidal tanks used to transport cryogenically frozen semen, “reproductive biomaterial in absentia.” (The Danish pavilion.)
I watched a woman cling to a metal folding chair, for hours, in an effort to remain submerged in a tank full of filtered urine contributed by the visitors. “This may be the most important piss of your life,” the attendant told me as I walked into the port-a-potty next to the tank, feeling guilty for adding to the vat of mixed anonymous piss. Will it ever come out of her hair? I know she chose to do it—and, god willing, she is being paid—but does that make what I’m about to do okay? Then I flushed. (The Austrian pavilion.)
I walked down many long hallways with dark, curtained-off rooms. In the rooms were either screenings of apparently random videos (deaf people performing synchronized swimming, a recording of someone scrolling through YouTube comments) or “installations” of detritus and other miscellany (piles of various types of rocks and sand, chairs cut in half, jackets made out of synthetic hair) with mysterious chanting and unidentifiable banging noises playing in the background. (Almost every other pavilion.)
Visiting the Venice Biennale in August is a trial of the will and the body just as much as the mind. It is often called “the Olympics of art,” an international competition in which almost every country in the world gets to stage an exhibition of its greatest and most notable works of art from the past two years. It’s always hosted in an open-air garden (the Giardini) and a former navy yard (Arsenale) at the very end of the island, which—in an admittedly rookie-visitor mistake—was an hour walk (or a €9.50 boat ride, also an hour) from my hotel. By the time I arrived at the Biennale every morning (which opened at a very Italian 11 a.m.) the sun was just ramping up to its most sweltering performance of the day. I tried dabbing the sweat away, but it proved to be a Sisyphean task, and I was forced to accept a permanent state of wetness.
Unlike the Olympics, however, the Biennale is not televised. If you want to see the international art world’s latest, you must journey to the sinking chest of art-historical treasures yourself. I had no expectations that the art would be “good.” But I went because I wanted to be certain—and because this year’s Biennale promised to be the most controversial in its 131-year history.
Just days before the opening fête, the jury members in charge of selecting the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, resigned in protest because the organizers refused to ban countries with leaders facing charges of crimes against humanity from the International Criminal Court (Russia and Israel). The Biennale leadership hardly flinched, instating a new prize—the “Visitor’s Lion”—to be decided by all ticket-holding attendees. It was a surprising and rare dose of democracy in the otherwise tightly gatekept art world. But the gesture was swiftly stripped of its power as the majority of participating artists recused themselves from consideration in solidarity with the jury—to which the Biennale responded by saying they would still keep those artists on the ballot to “guarantee all visitors their freedom of expression,” though votes for them will not be counted.
With such charged energy leading up to the event, I wondered if there would be signs of art-world discontent, if not revolt—canvases floating down the canal, perhaps, or scalps with $200 haircuts dangling from the Italian pines. Yet when I asked roughly a dozen staff members whether they’d seen anything of note protest-wise, most of them either had no idea what I was talking about or said nothing had remained after the ceremonial opening week. When I asked an American gallery attendant if he saw any acts of dissent, he said he hadn’t but someone else told him that a group of people earlier in the summer “put up stickers or something.”
So I sought out the most polarizing pavilions myself, starting with the U.S.—our first MAGA-sanctioned exhibition. This year, the State Department picked the artist Alma Allen according to new standards of “American excellence” after the usual steward, the National Endowment for the Arts, bowed out due to a lack of funding and personnel. Allen smooshes clay in his hands, 3D-scans his creations, then casts enlarged versions in bronze. Maybe they could be patriotic if you buy Trump’s view that anything big and shiny is beautiful, but they inspired exactly neutral feelings in me. They look like giant wads of chewing gum that you’d find stuck to the bottom of a school desk. Not enough to warrant any protest beyond indifference.
Yet going to the barricades is perhaps unnecessary when institutional critique is baked into the art itself. Even before any of this year’s political theater, the Biennale’s curator Koyo Kouoh (who died tragically in 2025, before her plans could be fully realized) chose the theme “In Minor Keys,” championing voices, traditions and practices underrepresented by the mainstream art world. In keeping with those directives, the Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven closed his nation’s pavilion in an act of protest, bringing down a metal gate in front of its glass doors, only opening it every hour for a performance piece in the dark. “A striking rejection of the times we are living in,” according to an accompanying pamphlet, this “intervention” targeted xenophobia and nationalism, as well as the privileged positions given to Western nations at the Biennale—with some pavilions (like the Dutch one) in more prominent locations than others. Accordingly, Verhoeven “positions La Biennale as a stage on which inequalities, tensions, hypocrisies and threats can be exposed and brought into discussion,” but does not facilitate any discussion—a gesture as productive as a meeting about having more meetings.
Over time, I started to experience the Biennale as a kind of iconographic soup—a smattering of images from one culture here, a dash of another there—usually in service of some abstruse political gesture. A Maltese artist made a life-size chocolate sculpture of Russell Crowe from Gladiator, meant to propose “doubt and doubting not as paralysis, but as a vital act of resistance.” The artist Andreas Angelidakis turned the Greek pavilion into a cross between an escape room and a gay nightclub, supposedly inspired by Plato’s cave, and somehow using that mix of settings as a lens to examine “nationalism, history and national identity as fabricated, commercialised truths.”
By the end of my three days in Venice, I found respite in anything with a clear premise and execution, which I finally encountered in the Ukrainian pavilion: a multichannel video installation depicting the journey of a public sculpture through Europe after it had been transported out of the country for protection from the Russian invasion. The sculpture, a white metal origami deer, was an all-too-obvious nod to fragility, fugitivity and innocence. But the videos of the deer strapped to a truck bed driving through European capitals—under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris or circling a parking lot in Prague—were undeniably evocative. I hesitate to celebrate this work too much on account of its coherence alone; in almost any other context I probably would have called it reductive, a little too easy.
But this year, as one of many newly enfranchised subjects of the international art world, I had to pick a favorite. As with real elections, I’m not sure my vote will matter. (In fact, I know it won’t.) Yet, I still tried to take my obligation seriously. I had to constantly remind myself of it—there were no signs I could see telling visitors they could vote. The only notice was one brief email in Italian, sent after I’d visited both halves of the show. But just knowing I had a ballot forced me to view every pavilion and consider whether any of the art on display deserved to win the top prize. And as with real elections, if none of the options are “good,” you go with the next best thing. The results will be announced after the show closes in November.
Image credit: Video frame from the documentary IDP. The process of evacuating the sculpture from Pokrovsk. Photo provided by Zhanna Kadyrova.