Talk to anyone at the Biennale, and one of the first things you'll hear is a reference to the sheer volume of artwork on display. "I haven't seen that yet," or "I didn't get that far" are common refrains. Indeed, this year's Biennale offers more national pavilions and collateral events than Venice has ever seen before. But two of the numerous such collateral events — billionaire Victor Pinchuk's Future Generation Art Prize exhibition and strangely named TRA Edge of Becoming, both of which opened on June 3 — present sharply contrasting attitudes when it comes to the quantity of work they choose to display. While both shows take over magnificent, quintessentially Italian spaces — the Palazzo Popodopoli and the Museo Fortuny, respectively — the former succeeds by doing more with less, while the latter, firmly committed to the "more is more" philosophy, saw mixed results.

Now in its fourth iteration, TRA Edge of Becoming is a historically well-received collaboration between the Museo Fortuny and the Belgium-based Vervoordt Foundation. The exhibition is designed to create unlikely, enchanting, and edifying links between the Fortuny's collection of textiles, clothes, and stage designs, the Vervoordt Foundation's eclectic holdings of antique and contemporary art, and the two guest curators' selections. This year, the list of participating artists tops 300, including names that are as significant as they are disparate: think Auguste Rodin, Marina Abramovic, and Anish Kapoor (and that's just the As). Other artists, including Hiroshi Sugimoto and Massimo Bartolini, were specially commissioned for the show. When asked what united the numerous artists in the exhibition, participant Susan Kleinberg seemed stumped for a moment, and then said decisively: "The quality."

The result of such a broad pool of artwork is a crowded exhibition that works only when it embraces its inevitable kitschiness — what do you expect when you hang a Mark Rothko over a tapestry? — but fails when taking itself too seriously. Some pieces, like a still from Matthew Barney's "Cremaster V" and Doretta Dolron's "Xteriors XIII," work beautifully in context and are strong in their own right. Barney's photograph, for example, of himself dressed in sumptuous robes on the floor of a massive theater, is placed next to a large Fortuny stage maquette. The contrast is a testament to the enduring pomp and artificiality of the theater, and of Venice itself.

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In contrast, the darker, starker first-floor gallery seemed to yearn to offer some kind of transcendence — 8th-century Bhudda torsos flanked a large black-and-white Richard Serra drawing, indicating the virtues of restraint. But even here, one can feel the curators giving in to their desire to add more and more — a commissioned soundtrack over the loudspeakers there, a Louise Nevelson sculpture in an empty corner here. In the end, the ground-floor space was too sparse to fit in with the excess upstairs, but too full to truly provide any sense of reserve.

The title of the show takes its inspiration from Eastern philosophy, but ends up as overstuffed as the rest of the show. "TRA" is the suffix of many Sanskrit words, like "matra" and "tantra." But organizers couldn't help piling on some slightly less reverent extras — press materials note that it's also "art" spelled backwards.

The balance between excess and economy is carried off slightly more elegantly 10 minutes east, at an exhibition for the 19 artists on the shortlist for Ukranian billionaire Victor Pinchuk's $100,000 Future Generation Artist Prize. The award is open to any artist under 35 who applies online. The prize's star-studded board and jury — including Jeff Koons, Robert Storr, and Glenn Lowry (who explained his role as board member to ARTINFO as that of "comforter") — lent it instant art-world cachet, and the inaugural 2010 contest drew over 6,000 applications from 125 countries. Now, the winner, Brazilian video artist and photographer Cinthia Marcelle, is exhibiting her winning films at the Biennale alongside 2009 PinchukArtCentre Prize winner Artem Volokytin and the other finalists, seven of whom made site-specific work — on relatively little notice, according to a few artists — for the event.

The light-filled, gilded Palazzo Papodopoli might have been an odd place for the largely video and mixed media artworks, but careful curating kept the art from feeling like it was wearing its grandmother's costume jewelry. In stark contrast to the cluttered TRA, the Generation Prize show devotes a room to each artist, which allows for both focused viewing and necessary adjustments. (The video rooms, for example, are almost all completely dark, which takes distracting architecture out of the equation.)

Some works played into the oversize scale of the space. Mexican artist Hector Zamora's massive, abstracted wooden boat — a feat of engineering, if a bit saccharine in the context — fills a large hall, almost swallowing the hanging chandeliers and bursting out onto the terrace above the canal. In contrast, a small side room is home to an even smaller sculpture by Wilfredo Prieto. A cube of watermelon no larger than ten square inches, it sits on the marble floor of a glittering gold room all by itself, an absurd, anachronistic minimalist cube abandoned in the Baroque era.

The spacious layout and gilded backdrop did make it difficult to trace common themes among the works — especially when those themes involved nature and Earthworks, both of which have been cited as uniting influences. Indeed, the natural world seemed utterly absent from inside the Palazzo. Even Chinese artist Cao Fei's site-specific installation of a garden at night was a world of artifice, rendered with plastic plants and turf.

When asked whether the Future Generation Prize represented a larger shift toward embracing an even younger demographic at the Biennale, MoMA director Glenn Lowry shrugged. "It's the direction the Biennale has been moving for a while now," he said. Then, he quickly maneuvered towards the door to move on to his next stop of the evening. At what has been a historically crowded Biennale, he presumably had lots more artwork to see.

For the video promo to the Future Generation Art Prize show in Venice, click below: