VENICE— In a desperate effort to keep my critical powder dry, I didn’t tweet Daniel Birnbaum’s exhibition “Making Worlds” (except for a couple of lapses), though I was instantly converting everything else I saw at the Venice Biennale into 140-character emissions. For the main event, I wanted to revert to the traditional mode of reflective prose criticism, where I try to hammer my thoughts into unity. Well, here I am, and all I want to do is tweet.

It would be so much easier than trying to distill any overarching meaning from this most general of exhibitions, which, as Birnbaum writes in his absurdly inclusive and inconclusive summary, encompasses 90 artists from every medium, school of thought, generation, and continent. The only criteria is that they “make worlds” — a criteria that of course excludes nobody. The linear procession of the Arsenale’s long hallway is a potentially excellent narrative vessel for an exhibition, but Birnbaum refuses to risk asserting a story line.

What “Making Worlds” does do extremely well — aside from generating a trenchant message or mood regarding artistic creativity or alternative visions of the world — is give artists plenty of space, relieve the viewer from visual overload, and produce highly rational and logical pairings, rhythms, and echoes. Which are more suited to extended individual tweets than continuous prose. So here goes:

• The first piece in the Arsenale, the late Brazilian artist Lygia Pape’s shimmering gold threads in cuboid shapes that disappear into darkness, recalls the centerpiece in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni (the exhibition’s second venue): Thomas Saraceno’s massive tangle of thick, black bungee cord–like wires, which would resemble a spider’s web if they weren’t so randomly arranged. (But anything artists do with thread is always mind-blowing to me, such as Fred Sandback's sublime achievements with this most minimal material.)

• “It’s not about modernism, it’s about us!” declares Ljubljana, Slovenia-based artist Marjetica Potrč in one of her exciting, manifesto-like pen-and-ink diagrams in the Arsenale. These unashamedly earnest drawings and slogans emphasize the individual as the crucial component of an urban society. “Urgent action is necessary,” Potrč writes. “I must open my heart. Exchange violence for goodness. Greatness = goodness. There is not much time left.” Meanwhile, overhead in this tightly curated room is the latest iteration of Yona Friedman’s urban fantasy Ville Spatiale. In 1956, Friedman came up with the concept for a super-flexible second city that would exist in a loose framework on struts above Paris. His sketches and models were always a bit shabby, but now the idea has degraded beyond legibility into a sub–Arte Povera mess of random cardboard boxes suspended in a web of string hanging from the ceiling.

• Both of those pieces call to mind Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972), in which Marco Polo describes fantastical, impossible metropolises to Kublai Khan. It turns out that all of them are versions of the true fantasy city: Venice. Also in the hall with Potrč and Friedman are Aleksandra Mir’s fake postcards with “Venice” emblazoned across tropical beaches, vistas of skyscrapers, oil rigs, and other decidedly non-Venice scenes. Mir’s point might be the opposite of Calvino’s: All the world is represented in microcosm in Venice during the Biennale, but Venice, with its moribund uniqueness, is no longer a model for the world’s cities.

• Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou has the largest installation in the Arsenale: a ramshackle village/factory crammed with wooden shacks, fetish-like planks of Styrofoam pierced by hundreds of colorful pins, sacks of concrete and white powder labeled “cocaine couleur,” random furniture, and video projections everywhere. Flying above all this is a triumphant flag bearing the exhilarating, unapologetic slogan “Human Being@Work.” It’s a brilliant piece portraying the mess and mania of production, calling to mind Dieter Roth’s surveillance of his studio and the darker comedies of manufacturing made by Mika Rottenberg. Birnbaum strategically follows up the intensity of Tayou’s village with a restful contrast: Richard Wentworth’s minimalistic and decidedly Western and old-fashioned installation of walking sticks hanging plaintively on small glass plates inserted into the walls.

• 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.