A Very Pretentious Form of Propaganda

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 freedo