• Later in the Arsenale, Italian video artist Grazia Toderi’s dual projection of a futuristic city in the midst of apocalypse, lit up by constant small explosions, is logically followed by Chu Yun’s darkened room, Constellation, twinkling sweetly with tiny multicolored lights from a range of household appliances humming soothingly. Yun’s installation carries a perfect mixture of accusation (electronics are the new heavens!) and redemption (but aren’t they beautiful?) — maybe too perfect.

• One standout piece that actually has nothing to play off of is Nathalie Djurberg’s installation in the basement of the Palazzo. Her grotesque stop-motion videos of little clay bodies pulling themselves apart have been shown exhaustively around the world as of late, so props to Birnbaum for pushing her beyond this familiar territory into physical sculpture. Alongside her videos, she’s made menacing, fecund, Little Shop of Horrors–style flora and fauna — enlarged versions, in threatening, three-dimensional form, of the environments we see in her videos.

The fact that I can only muster tweet-like individual observations might be because my attention span and capacity for lucid thought have been irreparably damaged by the relentless churn of social media (as a spate of recent articles here, here, here, and here have warned). But I think it’s more to do with the fact that Birnbaum’s expert pairings don’t add up to anything cohesive or urgent. This congress of artists is very orderly, but there doesn’t seem to be any agenda.

I wish Birnbaum had curated a Biennale titled “Making the World” instead of the airy-fairy, imaginary “worlds.” Sadly, this show makes clear that it’s not artists who are making the world. Technology, terrorists, movies, hedge funds, banks, brands, Obama, the G8, the G20, and — as is evident in the United Arab Emirates and Abu Dhabi exhibitions — mega-developers are the ones making and articulating the world. All the artists here can do is respond to it.

Often they do that very well: Paul Chan’s five-hour, 45-minute projection of silhouetted figures engaged in an appalling mechanical orgy accelerates the sadism of Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray. Goshka Macuga’s huge rug-like banner, wrapped around two pillars in the Arsenale, proclaims, “Plus Ultra” and depicts the G20 leaders smiling. This piece is an adaptation of the Spanish coat of arms, which in itself is based on the mythological pillars of Hercules, supposedly located in the Straits of Gibraltar, at the edge of the known world, and fearfully declaring “Nec Plus Ultra” — nothing further beyond.

One of Birnbaum’s few daring and assertive curatorial moves is the timely resurrection of German artist Thomas Bayrle’s stunning Chrysler wallpaper from 1970, in which he renders, in Pop-style repetition, a proud automobile created out of creepily warped Chrysler logos. Now that the U.S. auto giant is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, what began as an ambivalent exaltation of Western 20th-century production power has become a devastating eulogy. Maybe Bayrle’s wallpaper was a prophecy in the first place, and maybe much of the work here will make similar sense in 40 years.