“With this exhibition,” Marx grumbled, “the bourgeoisie of the world has erected in the modern Rome its Pantheon where, with self-satisfied pride, it exhibits the gods which it has made for itself.” Capital created “a world after its own image.” The “concentrated power of industry” was “demolishing national barriers” and “blurring local peculiarities”; the national pavilion was a shop window. “For the first time in the history of the world, a national museum is formed in which a whole nation is inside a building.”

Okwui Enwezor, the curator of the fifty-sixth Biennale’s central exhibition, agrees.1In our “global landscape,” he tells us, national pavilions are “the most anachronistic of exhibition models.” Still, the old bourgeois hegemony enforces its “unquestionable allure,” and Enwezor, denouncing as he goes, is happy to polish it. This year, the thirty national pavilions of the Giardini are accompanied by twenty-three national displays in