A view of the entrance of the Arsenale during the Venice Art Biennale. The 53rd International Art Exhibition, titled Making Worlds, presents works from about 90 artists from 77 countries. (Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images)

The Venice biennale, the mother of all modern art biennales, seems to be straining under the weight of its own fecundity. Now in its 53rd incarnation, the biannual event is enormous, presenting hundreds of square metres of art and spawning dozens of collateral events in the city – from improvised music in Venice churches to the opening of a restored Punta della Dogana, with its impressive collection of modern works. (Venice also has biennale offspring in Lyon, Sydney, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Havana and Seoul, to name the big ones.)

While the Venice Biennale always manages to delight and surprise, there is also a lot of under-thought, badly executed art. And this year, it's showing.

Much of the work on display at the biennale is commissioned, so artists scramble to fill the new order, so to speak. While there are always displays that delight and surprise, there is also a lot of under-thought, badly executed art. And this year, it's showing.

The exhibition space is divided into two main sections. One is the Giardini Gardens, where 77 countries have permanent pavilions showcasing artists from their nation. The second section, the Arsenale, is the spectacularly beautiful former shipyards of Venice, worth seeing for the old brick archways and rusted steel alone. This year, the biennale is curated by 46-year-old superstar Daniel Birnbaum. Its title is usually nonsensical, and the theme this time around is no exception: “Making Worlds.”

But first a word about Canada's exhibit in the Giardini section. London-based Canadian film artist Mark Lewis represents our country this year with Cold Morning, four short silent films shown simultaneously, side by side. Two are shot in rear projection, a technique associated with old Hollywood movies where actors are filmed in studio, with the on-location scenery shot separately and projected behind them. One, Nathan Phillips Square, a Winter's Night, Skating, features a romanticized scene of two lovers skating around in front of Toronto City Hall, and the other, The Fight, a Vienna street scene in which men and women shove each other in hypnotic waves of tension that threaten to erupt into violence, but never do.

A still from Mark Lewis's Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter's Night, Skating. (Mark Lewis/Monte Clark Gallery/Clark & Faria/Galerie Serge le Borgne)

Lewis's films don't run much over five minutes each, but there is no seating provided and it's asking a lot of the public to stand through them all. In fact, most shuffle out of the room after a few minutes, as soon as their interest lags. Rear projection is the key element of two of the shorts. No one I spoke with who had seen the films had understood that rear projection was even used here. Many enjoyed them for other reasons, so whether or not this constitutes a failure of the work is up for debate. (Memo to all video artists and curators: give people a place to sit.)

As always at the biennale, concept art dominates, much of which consists of banal, one-trick-pony "statements." A few glaring examples from the Arsenale area: a huge room with 24 towering framed mirrors, 12 intact on the left side of the room, 12 smashed on the right side; a long white wall with various walking canes dangling from narrow glass shelves; another wall hung with what look like oversized stainless-steel towel racks from soft rope; another room crammed with a noisy, cluttered recreation of an African shanty town; a large expanse of floor strewn with spools of covered yarn; and so on.

It's been almost 100 years since Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal for display in an art exhibit, launching a century of post-modernist appropriation of everyday objects, which shifts their meaning by shifting their context. It might have been whimsical and daring in 1917, but in 2009, unless the execution is truly exquisite or the concept truly original, it's the kind of stuff that gives modern art a bad name.

An example of extremely successful concept art this year is Venezia by Russian Aleksandra Mir. Mir's work consists of open boxes of about three dozen different postcards with Venice (or Venezia) written across the cards. The photos on the front all feature scenes with water, but have nothing to do with Venice. There’s everything from flamingos taking flight and beach scenes with surfboarders to industrial wastelands and oil rigs.

What's so great about this work is that at first, it's not clear that the cards are mislabelled; only by sifting through one after another do you slowly get pulled into the joke. The postcards highlight the often absurd disconnect between our travel experience and the vision of our travel experience we want to project — the one we send home via postcards. It also suggests that many places in the world today are interchangeable, having lost any distinct character. While the concept is essentially a joke, it's superbly executed and one that, unlike so much modern art, has an inclusive, friendly feel.

Sweden's Daniel Birnbaum, the curator of this year's Venice Biennale. (Andrea Pattarao/AFP/Getty Images)

It not only changes the way you see an everyday object, but also allows many ways to re-interpret it. People could take as many postcards as they wanted, so the work has a shelf life beyond the biennale, what with people mailing the cards to friends. The postcards went like hotcakes.

So, too, did the candies and granola supplied in The Greater G8 Advertising Market, whose theme, we read below the title, is "the emancipation of free world trade 2009." The work is by Zambian-born Anawana Haloba, who now lives in Oslo. Haloba's exhibit is a street vendor's stand with five aluminum bins full of different sweets. The bins' labels read like a lexicon of fair trade, eco-friendly catchwords and symbols: "Bolivian Organic Soybeans: Help the local farmers build the local economy that builds the national economy" and "Vigobe Corn Flakes: A Malawian product not genetically modified" with the picture of a smiling African mother holding a baby. Recycling signs and happy faces are stuck on the side.

But what's inside the bins are simply commercially produced candies and cereal from the West – a shameless betrayal of the labels' promise of global equity. What's amazing about the work is that the rich-nation hypocrisy it underscores with the fake labels is then acted out by the privileged public: the stand attracted the art crowd like bees to honey, with people jostling to get their favourite flavoured candy while barely pausing to see what the work was about. This transformed it into a kind of performance art, with the public's greedy (yet unwitting) participation.

A final, quick mention of two works of particular beauty. In Sade for Sade's Sake, Hong Kong-born artist Paul Chan projects fluttery silhouettes of wooden dolls engaged in an orgy onto a large wall, rendering the scene startlingly delicate and poetic. In Shadow Play, Germany's Hans-Peter Feldmann arranges tables in a long row with small, everyday objects and plastic toys placed on 12 rotating Lazy Susans. Behind each Lazy Susan, a light projects the images of the objects onto a dark wall. The result is a haunting, multi-layered dance of shadows and light.

Against a backdrop of so much flash-in-the-pan art, these two displays are a wonderful example of how a simple idea — if well thought-out and meticulously implemented — can be a thing of splendour.

The Venice Biennale runs until Nov. 22.

Megan Williams is a Canadian writer based in Rome.