In theory, this is because of the art — the hard-hitting, big-statement, generously-funded art. It’s supposed to be a celebration of excellence, an opportunity for countries to showcase the heights of their culture. But what happens when this is no longer the case?

With this year’s theme, “Foreigners Everywhere”, the cultural status quo of the last few years became crystallised. Identity politics and decolonisation ruled above all. The Spanish pavilion showed a Peruvian artist who spoke about historical colonialism; the American pavilion featured a First Nations artist who used Native American performative rituals as the basis for his work. Each was applauded more than the last — except in the case of Germany.

In the German pavilion, there is an artwork called “Light to the Nations” by Yael Bartana, an Israeli artist living in Berlin. It is an installation of a Sixties-style model spaceship, suspended at the top of a dark room, floating like a distant solar system in a mist of mesmerising light patterns. The title refers to the Book of Isaiah, when God tells the prophet that Israel’s outward mission will be led by the principle of light. It is about the future of the Jewish civilisation assuming the worst has already happened, posing the haunting question: where would Jews live if they were unwelcome everywhere on Earth? 

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This was my favourite artwork of the whole Biennale; and, one night, over proseccos in Dorsoduro, I confessed as much to the Emerati pavilion gallerina. I watched as the blood rushed to her face: “That kind of artist shouldn’t have a platform,” she replied. “With everything that’s going on right now, how could any country promote an artist like her?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by her response. Since October 7, art galleries across the West have faced criticism for spotlighting Israeli artists. And since the Biennale opened in April, there have also been anti-Israel protests outside not only the already-closed Israeli pavilion, but also the German one. 

What was peculiarly ironic in Venice, however, was that under the logic of identity politics favoured by the Biennale, Germany’s decision to spotlight a Jewish artist was entirely fitting. Isn’t the whole premise of this ideology to shift “the culture” away from those who have “held the power” historically? Why is a German attempt at cultural reparations to the Jewish people not valid, when most other pavilions were essentially a cultural apology to their oppressed peoples? 

The answer, I suspect, lies at the start of almost every artist’s career — at art school. Even before October 7, the popularity of the BDS movement in universities, particularly among the coolest art students, was obvious. After October 7, however, more overt anti-Jewish sentiment became firmly embedded in the universities, falling in line with the trends of wider society. 

At art school, this is even more pronounced because, on an educational level, the bare minimum is expected from you. I remember from my time applying to art schools how difficult it was to find a course that taught electives in both academic and practical subjects. I was lucky to find a course which doubled as a history of art degree, as one of the only things I was taught on the art side was “artistic research”. Here, lecturers told us that, as artists, walking around a park is as valuable as reading a book. More than anything, they prized transgression for transgression’s sake. Yet transgression has its limits.

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For Ben, an Israeli artist and student at a London art school for the past year, the repercussions of this became all too apparent following October 7. Having lost a close friend at the Nova music festival, and one of the only Israelis in the school, Ben (not his real name) felt it his duty to have a conversation with a fellow student about the anti-Israel banners she was hanging around the university, including ones that depicted the state of Israel eliminated from a map of the Middle East and which called for an “end to our university’s research, commercial and institutional partnerships with the ‘Israeli State’”. Concerned by their presence on campus, Ben sent her a polite message, hoping to open up a channel of communication. The activist declined. Ben didn’t push, and assumed that was that. 

A few weeks later, however, Ben was summoned by the university. He was told that the activist had filed an official complaint against him for bullying, and was instructed to attend a meeting about his “harassing” behaviour. He was also warned that its outcome could affect his ability to graduate. Eventually, the claim was dismissed, though the university still issued Ben with an “official warning”: if he ever contradicted the student again, his time at the institution would immediately be terminated. Luckily for him, it was his last month before graduation, and he obviously has no plan to return for more. 

Ben’s experience is far from unique. Noa, a London-based artist who is exhibiting at Frieze for the first time this year, is also Israeli. A few months ago, a British friend she used to be close to told Noa (also a pseudonym) the reason she’d has stopped talking to her. “I was worried you might be a Zionist,” she said. Her evidence, she explained, consisted of the fact that Noa followed a Jewish art collector and actress Amy Schumer on Instagram — both of whom had posted about the Israeli hostages. Of course, this is something that works both ways. I felt a deep sense of betrayal too when artistic colleagues of many years, in the wake of October 7, started posting about the need for “Palestinian resistance”, or shared a conspiratorial infographic about the impossibility of being antisemitic because “Jews aren’t semites”.

In an industry where being trendy is the most precious commodity, galleries have been equally nervous about taking on Jewish artists. “It’s a big risk for any gallery to take on a Jewish artist right now,” says Sarah, a Jewish artist with gallery representation in London and also speaking to UnHerd anonymously. “As fucked up as it is to say, I feel lucky. It could be much worse.”

Even with Sarah, her Jewishness was a cause for concern. When she joined the gallery, she was asked if she planned “on becoming an online activist”, despite the fact that another artist on their roster is an active pro-Palestine protestor online. At one point during her induction to the gallery, she was told: “We’re going to downplay the fact that you are Jewish.” 

In such a climate, it’s perhaps not surprising that many Jews in the arts feel the need to hide their identity. It is striking, after all, that everyone I spoke to for this article insisted on remaining anonymous; all of them fearing the negative impact that speaking freely might have on their careers. One artist told me: “I would love to be open and use my name for your piece, but I can’t risk being dropped by my gallery.”

For some, like Maya, an emerging curator, seeing this has not only been heart-breaking but also discouraging. The pseudonymous artist decided to leave London and move back to Israel. “I miss my friends and family a lot,” she told me. She’d found it exhausting to deal with the relentless anti-Jewish sentiment during her MA in London over the past year.

I understand this. October 7 marked a change in my life, too: I was no longer able to live in a world with so many painful barriers in front of me, so I took several months out, returned home to Madrid, and focused on building myself in other ways. After overhearing artists in my studio talk about how the “Jews control the media”, I wanted to make sure I had skills beyond the art world. I needed to be prepared, just in case, like countless other Jews this past year and throughout history, I am forced to pack up and leave.

There is a broader tragedy here, too. Art dies when there is only one right way to understand and react to the world. It comes alive, however, when it touches on something we can’t quite understand, or something which remains unspeakable. And so, I am reminded once more of Bartana’s work. Standing in that dark room with pounding techno reverberating through the walls and inside my chest, with the plumes of gaseous CO2 unfurling onto the floor, I craned my head towards the light.

The response, as one might imagine, was mixed. On the one hand, Patrik Schumacher, principal of the major architecture practice Zaha Hadid Architects, was irate. “The Venice ‘Architecture’ Biennale is mislabelled and should stop laying claim to the title of architecture,” he wrote. Yet other critics applauded the radical change of direction. “Artists and designers have occupied these spaces in a much more convincing way than usual,” wrote Tom Wilkinson.

Exhibiting architecture is tricky: you reduce these big, expensive outdoor structures into smaller indoor ones. And how exactly? Models? Photographs? Drawings? Films? All of the above? Why would you even bother? It is an impossible but necessary game. And yet it is something that we have been playing for as long as architecture itself; so long in fact, that it is architecture.

Of course, the palazzi of the Grand Canal remain untouched, and this may seem like an esoteric, avant-garde kerfuffle that is best ignored. However, even if you are a hopeless trad, the absence of architecture at the Venice Biennale is an unsettling development, which reveals much about the predicament of today’s creative classes.

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Consider the German pavilion. Not only does it lack any trace of real architecture, but its limited rhetorical force is further diluted by the fact that this has been done before. For the 1993 Art Biennale, Hans Haacke and Nam June Paik ripped up the marble floor of this kicked-about building and stuck up the words “Germania” on the back wall. Just after reunification, the artists were using the pavilion designed by Ernst Haiger, a Third Reich architect, to call into question German expansion in an admittedly unsubtle way. We got it. Today, by contrast, it isn’t immediately obvious what this round of petulant floorboard extraction is meant to symbolise. Boo Nazis again?

If so, then what explains the Israeli pavilion? And the Swiss one? Clever reasons are given for this strategy of non-representation: the Germans want to concentrate on activist community-building on the southern Venetian island of Giudecca, although whether the poor Giudeccans, who seem to have a thriving community, had any say in the matter is not disclosed. The Israelis wanted to show that their modernist pavilion is a product of a machine age. The Swiss wanted to discuss “neighbourliness”. (No one stopped to consider how you’d feel if your neighbour was displaying a plan of your house in theirs. Neighbourliness is not the word you’d use when phoning the police.)

But the emptiness endures: a questionable aesthetic strategy made all the more dubious given that the really empty pavilion is the Russian one, a symbol of their pariah status and a chilling reminder of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The commissioning cycle is long, of course, and curators can be hostage to fortune, but in comparison to this very real emptiness, the contrived desolation of other pavilions seems churlish and easy to misinterpret. Nothing can be more misunderstood than nothing.

This nothingness reflects a crisis of confidence in the creative classes, prompted by the populist moment of 2016. For once, Britain has led the way. In 2018, the British pavilion for the Biennale was empty. The curators Adam Caruso and Peter St. John made it clear that this was an articulation of what they saw as the cultural crisis prompted by Brexit: it was a kind of mute tantrum; a throwing up of the hands in the air. Far from being an isolated moment, this crisis has spread from nation to nation and for good reason.

Meanwhile, the study of architecture has become far more popular even as construction has become less likely. According to the Architects’ Council of Europe, the number of architects grew by 24% between 2008 and 2018. During that time, studying architecture became far more expensive, especially given that courses often last between five and seven years. Whatever it is we are witnessing in the pavilions of the Giardini, it has been conceived by architects who have spent more money on their education than those who exhibited in Venice over a decade ago.

The industry into which they are passing offers little reward. Although it may not seem like it, we are designing and building less. Construction output across the EU is currently running at about 80% of the levels seen before the banking collapse of 2007/8 which, in terms of housing, was just about keeping pace with demand. The net result is that the number of architects working in badly paid academic jobs has dramatically increased. Withdrawn from the act of building, architects have turned to critiquing the very idea of architecture itself. (The Czech pavilion offered a self-help guide on how to deal with the difficulties of the architecture profession, with “just leave” as one of the options.)

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“Am I out of touch?” says Principal Skinner in The Simpsons. “No, it’s the children who are wrong!” he answers himself. Architects, and the architectural culture which Venice is the acme of, follow the same trajectory. The more extreme end of environmental activism — the Extinction Rebellion crowd — has found a home in the architecture profession. A sense of dislocation from the concerns of the public, and the sheer volume of materials that the architect must deploy, means that a need for increased care in allocating resources has turned into a complete abnegation of architecture. It is quite common to hear architects, whose livelihoods have historically been based on building new things, say that any new building is bad because of the climate crisis.

Yet emptiness is not the only strategy of non-representation going on throughout the Biennale pavilions. Elsewhere, there’s an odd fixation with the processes of eating and shitting. The Spanish have surveyed the food industry (not its architecture, the industry itself); the Dutch have explored plumbing and the Finnish toilets. The effect is to create an analogy between the body and the building. This mapping of construction onto consumption leaves a note of slightly scatological revulsion at our embeddedness in capitalist modes of production. (The extraordinary cartoons on the wall of the Dutch pavilion make the analogy between plumbing and banking explicit.)

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Perhaps because of this, Schumacher suggests that the Venice Biennale may be conceiving its own demise. I think this is overly dramatic, and correctives to the trend towards nothingness exist. One further feature of this year’s Biennale is that firms such as GMP Architekten, one of Germany’s finest, made their own off-site pavilion (a fascinating exploration of their renovation of civic halls). Other ventures and venues are already creating a fringe, outside the official event. Furthermore, by dint of the fact that pavilions are commissioned by different bodies and there is in fact a competition at its core, there is the chance they will once again engage with the pressing needs of society. The Biennale can become an organ for helping architectural culture out of its self-regarding impasse, freeing it from its obsession with closure and emptiness.

It is outside Venice, though, that one finds architecture’s ruthlessly applied redemption. On my way home from the city, I visited an astonishing public hospital in the dockland area of Cadix in Antwerp, built by a developer-led consortium but designed by the architects Robbrecht and Daem. The process by which the building was created was often self-confounding, the architects were often unable to speak directly to the end-user, the hospital trust, during the 10 years it took to build. However, the building they have created is exceptional, all the more humane for its moments of strange compromise; the architects bloodied but unbowed after a decade of delivery. It is, in other words, considerably better than nothing.