What the Venice Biennale Reveals About the West’s Cultural Confidence

July 28, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Wangechi Mutu, The End, Where All Began, EdEN, 2026. Photo by Simone Padovani/Getty Images

Every two years, Venice holds up a mirror to the West, and every two years the reflection grows fainter. The 61st Biennale, which opened in May under the title “In Minor Keys,” performs the diagnosis with candor. It highlights present tensions while returning them in an accessible form. Fragility has become a house style and collapses curatorial themes; even anger is calibrated to the logistics of the international circuit. A piece tends to survive in proportion to how readily it converts into narrative, panel and content. However, the power of the curator has now displaced that of the artist, and the wall text has displaced the execution, concept, techniques, craft and form that flow from a creative imagination.

There is also a structural observation here. The Venice Biennale has pulled off an almost Dadaist trick of turning the radical-chic aesthetics of past editions into a new orthodoxy. Antonio Gramsci’s belief was that durable power is rarely exercised through force. Instead, it facilitates the slow capture of cultural institutions and the conversion of a partisan worldview into common sense: the assumptions no one notices because everyone has absorbed them. Capture the libraries and museums and you no longer have to win the argument; you have become the weather. Gramsci developed this theory while imprisoned under fascism, arguing that political power ultimately depends on cultural leadership as much as coercion. What Venice shows is the same logic but operating in reverse—an orthodoxy that asks the West to perform a continuous rite of self-correction as the price of admission to its own institutions.

The 2026 edition makes this concrete. Weeks before opening, the international jury announced it was withdrawing and would withhold prizes from artists whose governments face International Criminal Court proceedings—a criterion widely understood to mean Israel and Russia. A prize structure that enforces a sanctions regime is no longer a cultural institution, but foreign policy in aesthetic dress. And the instrument has been turned, strangest of all, against the very states that house it. Europe spends its cultural authority against its own room for maneuver, which is the very opposite of pluralism.

These are the actions of a tired hegemon, and it arrives as the hegemony itself gives way to something more multipolar: the gradual erosion of the dollar’s primacy; the spread of alternative payment systems; the renegotiation of NATO burdens; the reassertion of national interest from Rome to New Delhi to Brasília. These developments are all connected. A civilization’s confidence in its arms, its currency and art rise and fall together, because all three rest on the underlying belief that it has something worth defending and creating. Soft power is the involuntary admiration that one civilization compels in others simply by being magnificent. Empires fall when their armies are defeated. Countries fall when they cease to be admired.

The pavilions manifest this most acutely. Walking past the European example one finds a managed melancholy and a well-behaved trauma. Meanwhile, it is several of the pavilions of the Global South where one finds something with more force in it: Wangechi Mutu’s shamanic authority; Ebony G. Patterson’s lush excess; Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s procession of clay migrants in exodus. These works do not apologize, because they come from cultures that have not been persuaded that the act of creation is itself suspect. The shift to a multipolar world is not only economic, but visually apparent, and on present evidence the cultures that still treat form as a moral act are the ones with the most conviction to spare.

“Anish Kapoor Archive” Exhibition Preview — Installation view: “Anish Kapoor Archive” at Palazzo Manfrin. Photo by Roberto Serra – Iguana Press/Getty Images)

Meanwhile, outside the Biennale, at the Palazzo Manfrin, Anish Kapoor’s red sculptures consume the space around them with a force that makes the official program resemble a long student occupation. That this should feel transgressive in 2026—a work that does not seek to educate, heal, inspire or correct you should read as the avant-garde is the whole diagnosis in miniature. Kapoor’s voids do not lecture. They proceed from the conviction that form taken seriously is already a kind of truth-telling, and ask the viewer to become equal to what is in front of them, rather than merely to feel “correctly” about it.

There is a lesson here for anyone who still treats soft power as an afterthought. A civilization’s capacity to make objects worth crossing an ocean to see is not a sentimental matter; it is the precondition of most other kinds of influence. When Beijing builds opera houses, Riyadh commissions museums and Mumbai expands its film industry, they are not copying a Western affectation, but reading the West’s own forgotten playbook back to it.

Venice in 2026 is teaching the right lesson by accident. The Biennale, with its curatorial liturgy and its quiet conscription into someone else’s foreign policy, shows what happens when guilt is mistaken for depth and messaging for meaning. Kapoor, across the canal, shows what happens when his pieces recall that beauty and ethics were never two separate things. A multipolar world will be navigated by the nations that can still make that argument. The rest will be permitted to write the catalogue.