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Not to toe a die-hard Marxian line, but the sheer magnitude of the spaces, the frightening quantity of money needed to mount the exhibitions, the necessary economic underpinning for any artist included, and the massive pilgrimage of dealers, collectors, curators, and critics for the first few days of the event reinforce the overwhelming commodity aspect of the entire enterprise. It is a cultural phenomenon, and it is big business even if the curator is officially in the nonprofit sector and aims to keep our sights on loftier concerns.

The word “globalization” is associated with international conglomerations. An artist included in the Biennale automatically becomes part of international art commerce. The commodity status of his or her work goes up. I do not mention this in a disparaging way, and it is not my intention to reduce any work to a mere commodity, but a raw reality of the Biennale, as elsewhere, may be that meaning is inseparable from the consumer vortex aspect of contemporary culture.

What distinguishes work by individuals from countries beyond Western Europe and the U.S.? In some cases, absolutely nothing. One extensive video installation included ten simultaneous projections of individuals, often tightly cropped, saying, “I will die.” Five screens were on one wall separated from the other six by a room that showed less compelling photographs of cemeteries. In the videos, the younger the subject, the more gleeful the statement. The artist Yang Zhenzhong is Chinese yet the cultural lines in the work are seamless; there is no indicator of one particular national affiliation or identity. We are citizens of the world. We will all die.

On the other hand, some works seemed more particular to the cultures from which they emerged. For example, materials were sometimes gleaned from the consumer products of a specific place. In Ghanian El Anatsui’s Dusasa I (2007) and II (2007), the two massive–two stories high, wide as a small city block–shrouds are made of wired bottle caps and wrappings. In the current environment, where fortunes are made in a dematerialized world, in cyberspace, or with high-end financial leveraging, labor and materiality are oddly anachronistic, even romantic, in the manner of a decaying building. The beauty, dare I use the word, is in the odd longing for the values no longer celebrated. The two giant, intricate, decorative curtains, akin to grand Renaissance tapestries, are gently draped, allowing the recycled consumer products (mere metallic wrappers and bottle collars) to reflect the spotlights. Anatsui uses the detritus of modern societies. There is a morality here as well as an aesthetic.

Colombian artist Oscar Munoz drew faces in water on cement and filmed the gray-on-gray drawing as well as the water evaporating. The image of the faces being created and disappearing were projected simultaneously so one face emerges as another fades away. In a Janus-like interpretation, the piece looks to the myth surrounding the origin of art itself and equally, as noted by Michael Kimmelman, brings to mind the mysterious disappearances that occurred under some South American dictatorships. A “the end is near” theme also showed up in Italian artist Paolo Canevari’s film Bouncing Skull (2007), which shows a boy in front of a bombed out building kicking a ball in the shape of a skull–or is it a skull? The overall effect is doom and “gloomish.”

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Japanese artist Hiroharu Mori added a note of levity. In the center of the Arsenale hallway, he suspended a large helium balloon sporting a question mark. In the gallery nook next to it was a video of the balloon in a park environment, and there was also a bin of small question mark balloons for the taking in the spirit of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who happened to represent the United States at the Biennale this year.