No exhibition is more inherently political than the Venice Biennale, thanks to its peculiar structure of “national participations” (better known as pavilions) in addition to a central curated show. But no Biennale in decades has been more shaken by political turmoil than this year’s edition, the 61st, which opened in May and will remain on view—barring some as yet unforeseen cataclysm—through November 22. And let’s face it: There’s something refreshing about seeing the conflictual politics that always bubbles beneath the surface of art come to the fore.

The political flash points at this year’s Biennale are the ones that were present at the last Biennale too—Israel and Gaza, or more accurately, Israel and Gaza and the United States and Russia and Ukraine. At that earlier one, things resolved themselves fairly simply: Russia’s pavilion lay empty, while Israel’s was occupied but locked up with a sign stating that “the artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.” Meanwhile, there was plenty of good art in the other pavilions—Wael Shawky’s video work for the Egyptian pavilion was an unforgettable masterpiece—and in the central exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” where I saw hopeful signs of the coming of a true “world art.”

This year’s curated exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” seemed to pursue the same goal as Pedrosa’s show: a view of art whose aesthetic values were no longer rooted in European traditions and their North American offshoots but in those of the whole world. Yet whereas the overall high quality of the work in “Foreigners Everywhere” gave that show the optimistic sense that artistic invention was flourishing ubiquitously under all sorts of conditions and among every kind of people, “In Minor Keys” left me with a more subdued feeling—one all too congruent with the show’s pointedly diffident title—of art nearly at a standstill.

That so much of the art of “In Minor Keys” is muted in effect is ironic, because so much of it is overproduced, aspirationally eye-catching, and so big: At times, I felt like I was making my way past a sequence of carnival floats. The dominant aesthetic was craftsy and accumulative, even if the art itself lacked the outsider’s imaginative idiosyncrasy or the cultural rootedness of folk art. Instead, much of it tended to feel like somewhat synthetic reinterpretations of such art.

At times, one wonders if perhaps a reason for the minor qualities of “In Minor Keys” is not the art itself but the fact that its curator, the Cameroonian Koyo Kouoh, died suddenly a year before the show was set to open. The project was completed according to her plan by the curatorial team she had assembled, but we can imagine that Kouoh would have felt freer to reinterpret her ideas, to revisit decisions and revise choices, if she had been around to bring the project to fruition.

This is not to say that there aren’t striking works in Kouoh’s exhibition. For example, Éric Baudelaire’s five-channel video installation, Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in My Mouth, offers a clear and sobering portrait of the labor being done in a massive Dutch warehouse where flowers from the world’s warmer regions are sorted and evaluated for sale and further shipment. In the context of the Biennale, the evocation of a global context for the movement of merchandise whose ultimate appeal is aesthetic—flowers are valuable for their beauty—is telling: One could imagine a similar work being filmed in a freeport storage facility for artworks. What we see more than anything else is how, even in an ostensibly systematized and impersonal operation like the warehouse, the work is performed by people who carry out their tasks with care and a humane, clear-eyed attentiveness.

Another striking video work is Rose Salane’s Mercurial New York, which shifts fluidly between a multitude of conversations in many languages among city dwellers of many sorts. In one conversation, young women speak in Arabic of an elderly family member in Beirut who is suffering from dementia; in another, a middle-aged man tells a friend about how, as a young man, he had almost lost himself to a life of crime—it was only the birth of his child that made him resolve to live differently. Salane has previously called her work “a love poem to the city of New York”—OK, I’m still a sucker for that, and this new piece achieves it with empathy and clarity. It’s not just the scenes she has created but also the elegant cinematic metric of her transitions from conversation to conversation that make it clear how sensitive this artist is to the human multitude that constitutes a city. Rather than imposing an artificial narrative structure on her material, Salane has found a formal language she can use to let these little windows on life open and close at their own pace.

But Baudelaire’s and Salane’s pieces, sad to say, are outliers at the Biennale. A kind of vitality may be manifest in the sheer multiplicity of elements in any installation, but this comes at the cost of sacrificing a deeper care that could have been invested in the structure of artistic decision-making. The accompanying texts in the show are filled with a high-flown rhetoric that attributes qualities to the art that can hardly be fulfilled. “In the face of polarizing state violence,” we are told, one artist “attunes us to our bodies and to each other, offering his sonic balm as a vehicle for introspection and collectivity,” while the work of another “manifests the implicit relationships between the earth and ourselves, gently transcending national borders, cultural differences, and language barriers to bring us into connection with one another.” But maybe artists—even if they’re also activists or spiritualists or community organizers, as so many of those in “In Minor Keys” are said to be—just don’t have the power to attune us to our true selves or to unite humanity across borders and languages. There’s a kind of self-deception at work here. I understand the attraction of an art that seeks to offer to revivify ancestral ways of knowing and being, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a catastrophic modernity that seems to be collapsing all around us. Who wouldn’t like to live according to the teachings of the local shaman rather than those of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel? But asserting that we have such a choice feels like pure fantasy, a comforting performance for tourists.

And it gets worse: This year’s national pavilions were even less inspiring than “In Minor Keys.” Hardly anything was really noteworthy. Most talked-about has been the Austrian pavilion, which features the work of Florentina Holzinger, who is better known as a choreographer and director than as an artist—though the boundaries between those categories, of course, can be extremely fluid these days. In fact, Holzinger’s work fits handily into the Austrian tradition of confrontational, body-oriented performance art, from the Actionists like Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl to feminist artists like Valie Export and Renate Bertlmann. In Venice, Holzinger turned the Austrian pavilion into a partially flooded “SEAWORLD VENICE”—all the water is recycled urine from the porta-potties where visitors are invited to make a contribution—in which nude women perform various maneuvers, such as slowly and elegantly climbing a pole that goes up through the building’s skylight to support a (presumably nonfunctional) weathervane. The most impressive stunt, at least on my visit, was the one in which one performer served as the clapper for a giant bell hanging from a crane just in front of the pavilion.

Speaking of purified piss, that would be a great lead-in for my discussion of this year’s American pavilion, but it also wouldn’t be fair. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about it has been dismissive of this year’s manifestation of my own country’s art; Jason Farago in The New York Times spoke for many when he called the sculptor Alma Allen’s offering “Brancusi for beginners (and a century late for that)” and said that it shows “some modest technical facility but no great thought.” I can’t disagree, but I could add that there are also vague echoes of more recent work, such as that of Tony Cragg or Saint Clair Cemin. The sculptures are mostly abstract, with figurative amendments; what Allen seems most interested in is what he can do with his materials—various kinds of stone as well as bronze and wood. But I kept wanting his sense of form to get sharper, more specific. Everything always seemed to be almost what it was trying to be. The show’s title, “Call Me the Breeze,” appeared intended to suggest that Allen wanted to make something light, perhaps almost intangible, out of his physically imposing materials—but it never happened.