As I left the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I felt like I’d just finished a puzzle that mocked me for solving it. Every two years, countries from around the world select an artist (or a group of artists) to showcase at contemporary art’s most prestigious festival. This year, after a process laden with complication and controversy typical of the second Trump administration’s cultural efforts, the United States picked the 55-year-old sculptor Alma Allen. He filled a series of rooms with quiet, abstract shapes, including an onyx boulder with a wavy surface, a folded sheet of scuffed bronze, and a standing oval of marshmallowish marble.
The work was neither magnificent nor hideous; my main reaction was to note my lack of one. But confusion, then annoyance, rose as I read the plaque by the exit, which was filled with more than 800 words of artspeak so pretentious that it made Jacques Derrida sound like ChatGPT.
“We are at a critical moment in culture,” wrote the pavilion’s curator, Jeffrey Uslip. He was referring to America’s 250th birthday, which inspired this exhibition that “favors deep time, eschews finite positions, and encourages artistic autonomy and curatorial independence.” According to Uslip, Allen makes “allocentric art” that “provides the ground for ‘the Allocene’—a proposal for art that embodies a state of alterity, weightlessness, and freedom of thought.” The artist also described his own work: “Here is cancellation deployed as a physical act,” and “here is the biggest risk of my life except for all the other ones.”
Gallery walls are hardly known for the quality of their copy, but this gobbledygook carried a passive-aggressive edge. Allocentric is the opposite of egocentric, and allocene is a made-up word suggesting a new epoch that—one imagines—deemphasizes identity and self-interest. Curatorial freedom and cancellation evoke the terms of Trump-era culture wars. Ostensibly, the only freedom of thought encouraged by Allen’s work is the freedom to mull what you’ll do for dinner later. But the implication was that his rocks and metals bravely defied small-minded concerns such as politics—even the politics that had landed Allen in that very pavilion.
Though the Biennale has been called the Olympics of the art world because of the way it brings the globe together in friendly competition, conflict was inescapable this year. In April, the Biennale’s five-member jury announced that it wouldn’t give prizes to nations accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court—thereby disqualifying Israel and Russia. A number of artists also called for the U.S. to be censured for its military actions of late. The festival’s organizers rebuked such calls by declaring the need for “a place of truce in the name of art, culture, and artistic freedom.” Days before the event was set to begin, the jury resigned in unison, leaving its once-prestigious awards to be determined by a poll of visitors.
America’s participation was already tinged by the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on the arts establishment—its attempted elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities, its revocation of grants under the aegis of fighting DEI, its disruptive rebranding of the Kennedy Center. In previous Biennale editions, the State Department has delegated an esteemed institution to oversee the U.S. pavilion; in Trump’s first term, the Madison Square Park Conservancy programmed a well-regarded show by Martin Puryear. The latest process, however, was a bit stranger.
The managing institution this year was the American Arts Conservancy, an obscure Tampa-based nonprofit that was founded in 2025 by a pet-supplies entrepreneur with personal ties to Trumpland. That group hired Uslip, who left his previous stateside curating job in 2016 after viewers protested an exhibition he organized in which a white artist smeared chocolate and toothpaste over pictures of Black people (Uslip says his departure wasn’t related to the scandal). A few prominent artists turned down what typically has been the most coveted invitation in American arts, and Uslip ended up booking Allen, a journeyman sculptor with little name recognition.
Allen’s work isn’t terrible. The mineral veins in his smooth-hewn stone pieces do, in fact, induce contemplation of “deep time.” His bronze figures intriguingly juxtapose structural deformity and Mar-a-Lago shininess. But his and Uslip’s written insistence that—as I understand it—this stuff evades categories and agendas seems deluded. In fact, walking around the Biennale, I came to suspect that he fit into a predictable and politically motivated trend: pariah-state minimalism.
The fest generally overflowed with ambitious and vibrant work, some goofy and some transcendent. In the main exhbition—a transnational collection of work selected by the team of Biennale’s head curator, Koyo Kouoh, who died last year—Beverly Buchanan’s drawings rendered rustic scenes from the American South with a sense of vibrating electricity. Greece’s pavilion, by Andreas Angelidakis, invited visitors into an immersive space that was like a glitchy 1980s video game set at a goth club. Sitting beneath neon lights on a plushy cushion resembling a gearshaft, I felt overstimulated in a way that was genuinely escapist.
Protests added to the carnivalesque atmosphere. Outside Russia’s pavilion last Wednesday, the perennial Vladimir Putin antagonists Pussy Riot joined with the activist group Femen to conjure a storm of pink smoke and guitar music. Later in the week, a number of exhibitions closed as participants stopped working, in protest of Israel’s inclusion. Japan’s pavilion had been filled with baby dolls wearing sunglasses—a project about parenthood by Ei Arakawa-Nash—but on Friday, a sign read BABIES ARE ON STRIKE TODAY.
By contrast, the mood inside the protested countries’ pavilions was sober. For Israel, the artist Belu-Simion Fainaru constructed a sculpture in which a grid of water droplets fell steadily into a dark pool, creating endlessly pulsing ripples. Wall text stated that each drop was “both a sign and a deferral of meaning,” and that by alluding to “drip irrigation—an Israeli innovation developed in response to desert conditions,” the art offered “an ethical metaphor for attentiveness, restraint, and care.” Restraint seemed like a striking word to emphasize when so much has been said about Israel’s lack of restraint in Gaza. As in the U.S. pavilion, polite art had been paired with pushy framing. Again, visitors were told the work was beyond meaning while also being given an official interpretation.
Visitors views “Rose of Nothingness” by Israeli artist Belu-Simion Fainaru, in the Israeli Pavilion during the pre-opening of the 61st Venice Art Biennale in Venice on May 6, 2026.
Russia took a similar approach, though with more noise and vodka. The art itself was mostly just large flower arrangements; explanatory signs spoke of gathering unalike people around “the mythic, anomalous figure of the tree.” The pavilion was open only for the press-preview week, programmed with an ongoing slate of performances and a free bar. The idea was that any socialization there would become part of the art too: “We aimed to fill the space with such situations as dancing, learning, listening, sharing timid glances.”
When I stepped inside, I was hit with ominous amplified droning: the music of the Moscow band Phurpa, whose members were swathed in black veils and sitting on the floor. Upstairs, a mix of hipsters also in fashionable drapery were mingling with people who appeared to be dignitaries in suits. Most paid no mind to the atonal roar that was growing in intensity. In a way, the stated aim of the pavilion to create meaning out of chance encounters was being enacted. Here was an on-the-nose illustration of the problem with treating the Biennale as a place of “truce,” beyond politics: One way or another, the broader context seeps in. Whether an artist wants to be or not, they’re working in a specific time, in a larger world.
This time in this world, of course, is marked by fraying alliances and state-sponsored conflict. Now more than ever, the country-by-country format of the Biennale—and other international competitions, such as Eurovision and the Olympics—necessarily serves the purpose of soft diplomacy, even if by conveying that a nation is a respectable member of the global community. And the stony-serious pomposity of the exhibitions that provoked the most backlash this year suggests how valuable it can be for a country accused of savagery to project a facade of sophistication. But anyone who’s spent time in the art world knows to watch out for a poseur.