Venice is a fishing village founded by people fleeing the Germans after the Roman Empire fell. If it looks improbable, it is: a city in the middle of a lagoon covered with marble when cost allows. She lies at the head of the Adriatic, where the trade routes meet — a wise investment in the crusades. Now a party town, a whore in brick and marble, Venice flaunts itself for Bezos’s wedding and attendant festivals. This is its expertise: this is what it lives for. Here be Trumps, Kardashians, the Queen of Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom, plus Oprah Winfrey: a guest list conjured by AI because, like actors in a play, they do not know each other. They were not invited to this wedding, but cast, and stalked to a shallow lagoon by the world’s press. It is an ancient display of power and control, so expensive no one can say what it costs: all of Bezos’s childhood dreams of being.

It is the final reveal — the unboxing — of the aesthetic of the age, and this also suits Venice, which loves aesthetics as much as it loves power, though it has more of the former than the latter these days. Theirs is a populist aesthetic, and at least — the bar is low here — it is honest: the most honest thing about oligarchy is its clothing. Vulgarity is always honest because it doesn’t want to be any thing else. At least it is not Cottage Core, which exists for rich Liberals to lie to themselves, and everyone, about how good they are. That is an aesthetic of denial. This isn’t.

This is the aesthetic of the Age of Trump: lewdness, power, rot and color blocking. It is pornographic, of course, and thrillingly unreal. The faces and breasts are augmented and shiny: not good enough as they are — for this is an aesthetic of anxiety, too — they must be renewed. They are gaudy frontage, like Venice herself, and the aesthetic mirrors Trump, made more for TV than for life. I think it is, essentially, a cry for Mama in the dark — tits, tits, tits! — and a cry for Dada too: bring me the diamonds! Will that make you happy, children afraid of the night? Of course not, but it’s worth a try.

Nothing is hidden and nothing is dissembled by these crazed exhibitionists: it is almost touching. And yet it is also costume. Kim Kardashian, all snakeskin and breasts, a hundred feet tall, reminds me of the vast Madonna on the walls of the Torcello cathedral in the Venetian lagoon, surrounded by fields of gold mosaic. I imagine her cracking from the walls and walking across the lagoon for a prick of Ozempic at the wedding, though the Kardashians might think her understated. Sánchez, who usually dresses like a Real Housewife of An Apocalypse Bunker, had multiple costume changes over the weekend, like a woman who does not know who she is and is now so rich she never will. She was a lampshade, Audrey Hepburn, and Princess Grace of Monaco, with graceless cleavage. She blew kisses to the media because that is easier — it has more reach — than speech.

What do they do? Not much, and it doesn’t matter here; it would be odd if they did, and we would be unable to project onto them so happily. Sánchez was a TV journalist: now she is a picture caption. Bezos sells things to people who confuse TV with life. Kardashian is in Reality TV: she does the same. DiCaprio sank with the Titanic. Orlando Bloom played an elf of Middle Earth, which was far less weird than this.

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But no one will say it — this wedding is weird, a royal wedding for commoners, a carnival made for press attention — because where there is power, there is tribute. Anna Wintour, the former editor of Vogue, gatekeeper of global style, prostrated herself before the couple, apparently offering them space in her magazine: I never pitied high fashion until now. Is Lauren Sánchez stylish if she appears in Vogue? Of course not: even I know not to wear a camisole to a presidential inauguration. Rather, Vogue is shameless to have her: it is taken over, colonized by the money it follows, another estate fallen to ruin.

There is more tribute from protestors who threatened to jump in canals with inflatable alligators to force Bezos out of Venice because they are exhibitionists too. No oligarchs welcome, they said, which means they do not understand the city they are in.

It is true that Venice was, until Napoleon, a Republic: of oligarchs. They wrote their names in the Golden Book, their Debrett’s Peerage; they power-boated in gondolas; they built a ship while the King of France was having lunch. All of Bezos’s tinny excess fits with Venice. I fantasize that he will insinuate himself into Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari. They might let him if he fixed the roof. Venice will do almost anything for a price. That’s its charm.

Above all, Venice fascinates because she works as metaphor. She was once everything humans were capable of, and she exists in peril from the sea. Daily jeopardy, then, but for what now? Very little. No wonder Bezos chose Venice for his fete: if futility were a city, this is it. Nothing besides remains.

Luckily, there’s a cure for our heartache: Venice for Pleasure. This irreverent guidebook by the English art historian J.G. Links promises “a guide to the pleasures of Venice without its pains”, which, in our era of frantic mini-breaks — of Instagramming and TikToking our way around as many must-see landmarks as possible — is a marvel and a revelation.

“Very few travellers seem to enjoy their first visit to Venice,” Links cautions. “They are awed, dazzled, overwhelmed… [but] above all, they are exhausted by it; physically, mentally and emotionally, its assault is too much for the ordinary human being to withstand.” This is a book for that wild curiosity: a tourist in pure pursuit of pleasure. If they follow Links, they may end up skipping their three-hour tour of the Doge’s Palace, but “Venice will have woven its spell around them, and they will be captives for life.”

Links asks just one thing: that everyone be a walker, “or, at least, a dawdler”. And that is because his guide consists of four narrated walks around Venice, from the shimmering Zattere to the lonely Cannaregio. The streets, Links says, have “a miraculous spring in the paving which makes fatigue almost impossible”. And he is careful to stop at “as many cafes as possible” for coffee or apéritif, from where he enchants us with stories and architectural details about nearby palaces, churches and bell towers contemplating collapse.

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With Links as a guide, the idea that Venice is somehow not real — that it is a circus, a Disneyland, a fossil — is banished. On my own strolls, I have seen drowsy postmen loading Amazon parcels onto little delivery boats at dawn; babbling Venetians spilling out of a bar onto the canal, eating baccalà mantecato and drinking wine from paper cups; families fleeing the stink of the summer to the furthest beach on the Lido; a seagull losing a brawl with a lagoon squid, turning the water jet black; a distressed elderly gentleman who has misplaced a valuable miniature he was hoping to sell. This is not a city without a soul.

There is another side to Venice: the merciless tour guides; the menageries of Murano glass animals; the overpriced, often-disappointing food (there is nothing worse than that fearful “delicacy”, the Venetian soft-shell crab, plucked from its squalid existence on the lagoon floor for your displeasure). Even Jan Morris, a lifelong admirer, admitted to feeling that tourism was “in some sense a prostitution of a great city, a degradation, a shame”.

But who’s to say that this carnival of profit isn’t real in its own way? The Venetians have been playing this same game since the 16th century, when, long after their blood-soaked earnings from the Crusades dried up, Venice devoted herself to readying pilgrims for the Holy Land. The piazza was full of Venetians flogging guidebooks, insecticides, and religious tat. Five centuries on, they’re still at it — and next Spring, we’ll be charged €5 entry to the city.

Earlier this year, my devoutly romantic friend took a photograph of a gondolier teaching his son to row in the moonlight: passing down his trade to the next generation. If he were canny, he would have also advised his boy on how to squeeze the most money out of unsuspecting tourists. But would this have made the scene any less remarkable? Any less Venetian? Certainly not.

There is a strong case in Venice for leaning into the artifice, for ditching our snobby disdain for anything that feels touristy. It is the burden of the Brit in Italy to live in dread of encountering a fellow countryman: to be sat next to another British tourist in a restaurant is the ultimate catastrophe. But what do we gain from this manic pursuit of authenticity? And what counts as an “authentic” experience abroad anyway? Is it to surround yourself with Venetians chatting and drinking in Campo Santa Margherita — even if the most you can say in Italian is ciao bella? Perhaps we’re simply chasing an illusion.

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Nowhere is this question more relevant than in the gold-leaf excess of Florian’s Cafe in San Marco. I went there one morning on the advice of Links (whose book is, admittedly, now a little behind on the cafe scene), and was so horrified at the thought of paying €12 for a hot chocolate, only to sit amid a throng of fellow tourists goggling and waving selfie sticks, that I upped and left. I later regretted it. Florian’s, I imagine, has been fleecing foreigners for 300 years. It is hardly inauthentic.

In fact, having lost her empire, Venice revelled in her duplicity, fashioning herself a new role as entertainer of the world. “Venice had given herself over to pleasure — but she still made it good business,” Links writes of the 18th century. “Her pageants and carnivals, her theatres and balls, were as much designed to attract the tourists as to make the Venetians themselves forget past glories.”

Yet Venice never let herself fade completely into gilded irrelevance. Even now, she is more than just a honeymoon city, a reliquary of bygone beauty. She is the home of the Biennale, the Film Festival, the Peggy Guggenheim collection, and a mother to the finest exhibitions of Venetian art. It is part of the fun to walk into a prim-looking church, only to find soft-porn playing above the altar, with humourless aesthetes watching from Play-Doh beanbags. Venice is both the art world’s greatest muse — and its harshest critic.

For Jan Morris, this was never enough. She dreamed that the city would once again become a noble marketplace. “East and West might meet once more,” she writes in Venice, “to fuse their philosophies at last, and settle their squalid bickerings… Venice is made for greatness, a God-built city, and her obvious destiny is mediation. She only awaits a summons.” It’s a beguiling vision, and one that could perhaps inspire Britain too, as it struggles to accept its waning status in the world.

As for the “perennial tourist”, we have begun a love affair with Venice that will last a lifetime — unless, like all the great romances, she sinks before we do. We can choose whether to drink hot chocolate at Florian’s or to amble along the quiet streets of Dorsoduro, knowing that each experience is just as authentic; just as Venetian. Because Venice has always been an exhibitionist. And in Venice, as in life, it is often the performance that is most real.

The response, as one might imagine, was mixed. On the one hand, Patrik Schumacher, principal of the major architecture practice Zaha Hadid Architects, was irate. “The Venice ‘Architecture’ Biennale is mislabelled and should stop laying claim to the title of architecture,” he wrote. Yet other critics applauded the radical change of direction. “Artists and designers have occupied these spaces in a much more convincing way than usual,” wrote Tom Wilkinson.

Exhibiting architecture is tricky: you reduce these big, expensive outdoor structures into smaller indoor ones. And how exactly? Models? Photographs? Drawings? Films? All of the above? Why would you even bother? It is an impossible but necessary game. And yet it is something that we have been playing for as long as architecture itself; so long in fact, that it is architecture.

Of course, the palazzi of the Grand Canal remain untouched, and this may seem like an esoteric, avant-garde kerfuffle that is best ignored. However, even if you are a hopeless trad, the absence of architecture at the Venice Biennale is an unsettling development, which reveals much about the predicament of today’s creative classes.

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Consider the German pavilion. Not only does it lack any trace of real architecture, but its limited rhetorical force is further diluted by the fact that this has been done before. For the 1993 Art Biennale, Hans Haacke and Nam June Paik ripped up the marble floor of this kicked-about building and stuck up the words “Germania” on the back wall. Just after reunification, the artists were using the pavilion designed by Ernst Haiger, a Third Reich architect, to call into question German expansion in an admittedly unsubtle way. We got it. Today, by contrast, it isn’t immediately obvious what this round of petulant floorboard extraction is meant to symbolise. Boo Nazis again?

If so, then what explains the Israeli pavilion? And the Swiss one? Clever reasons are given for this strategy of non-representation: the Germans want to concentrate on activist community-building on the southern Venetian island of Giudecca, although whether the poor Giudeccans, who seem to have a thriving community, had any say in the matter is not disclosed. The Israelis wanted to show that their modernist pavilion is a product of a machine age. The Swiss wanted to discuss “neighbourliness”. (No one stopped to consider how you’d feel if your neighbour was displaying a plan of your house in theirs. Neighbourliness is not the word you’d use when phoning the police.)

But the emptiness endures: a questionable aesthetic strategy made all the more dubious given that the really empty pavilion is the Russian one, a symbol of their pariah status and a chilling reminder of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The commissioning cycle is long, of course, and curators can be hostage to fortune, but in comparison to this very real emptiness, the contrived desolation of other pavilions seems churlish and easy to misinterpret. Nothing can be more misunderstood than nothing.

This nothingness reflects a crisis of confidence in the creative classes, prompted by the populist moment of 2016. For once, Britain has led the way. In 2018, the British pavilion for the Biennale was empty. The curators Adam Caruso and Peter St. John made it clear that this was an articulation of what they saw as the cultural crisis prompted by Brexit: it was a kind of mute tantrum; a throwing up of the hands in the air. Far from being an isolated moment, this crisis has spread from nation to nation and for good reason.

Meanwhile, the study of architecture has become far more popular even as construction has become less likely. According to the Architects’ Council of Europe, the number of architects grew by 24% between 2008 and 2018. During that time, studying architecture became far more expensive, especially given that courses often last between five and seven years. Whatever it is we are witnessing in the pavilions of the Giardini, it has been conceived by architects who have spent more money on their education than those who exhibited in Venice over a decade ago.

The industry into which they are passing offers little reward. Although it may not seem like it, we are designing and building less. Construction output across the EU is currently running at about 80% of the levels seen before the banking collapse of 2007/8 which, in terms of housing, was just about keeping pace with demand. The net result is that the number of architects working in badly paid academic jobs has dramatically increased. Withdrawn from the act of building, architects have turned to critiquing the very idea of architecture itself. (The Czech pavilion offered a self-help guide on how to deal with the difficulties of the architecture profession, with “just leave” as one of the options.)

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“Am I out of touch?” says Principal Skinner in The Simpsons. “No, it’s the children who are wrong!” he answers himself. Architects, and the architectural culture which Venice is the acme of, follow the same trajectory. The more extreme end of environmental activism — the Extinction Rebellion crowd — has found a home in the architecture profession. A sense of dislocation from the concerns of the public, and the sheer volume of materials that the architect must deploy, means that a need for increased care in allocating resources has turned into a complete abnegation of architecture. It is quite common to hear architects, whose livelihoods have historically been based on building new things, say that any new building is bad because of the climate crisis.

Yet emptiness is not the only strategy of non-representation going on throughout the Biennale pavilions. Elsewhere, there’s an odd fixation with the processes of eating and shitting. The Spanish have surveyed the food industry (not its architecture, the industry itself); the Dutch have explored plumbing and the Finnish toilets. The effect is to create an analogy between the body and the building. This mapping of construction onto consumption leaves a note of slightly scatological revulsion at our embeddedness in capitalist modes of production. (The extraordinary cartoons on the wall of the Dutch pavilion make the analogy between plumbing and banking explicit.)

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Perhaps because of this, Schumacher suggests that the Venice Biennale may be conceiving its own demise. I think this is overly dramatic, and correctives to the trend towards nothingness exist. One further feature of this year’s Biennale is that firms such as GMP Architekten, one of Germany’s finest, made their own off-site pavilion (a fascinating exploration of their renovation of civic halls). Other ventures and venues are already creating a fringe, outside the official event. Furthermore, by dint of the fact that pavilions are commissioned by different bodies and there is in fact a competition at its core, there is the chance they will once again engage with the pressing needs of society. The Biennale can become an organ for helping architectural culture out of its self-regarding impasse, freeing it from its obsession with closure and emptiness.

It is outside Venice, though, that one finds architecture’s ruthlessly applied redemption. On my way home from the city, I visited an astonishing public hospital in the dockland area of Cadix in Antwerp, built by a developer-led consortium but designed by the architects Robbrecht and Daem. The process by which the building was created was often self-confounding, the architects were often unable to speak directly to the end-user, the hospital trust, during the 10 years it took to build. However, the building they have created is exceptional, all the more humane for its moments of strange compromise; the architects bloodied but unbowed after a decade of delivery. It is, in other words, considerably better than nothing.