As I left the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I felt like I’d just finished a puzzle that mocked me for solving it. Every two years, countries from around the world select an artist (or a group of artists) to showcase at contemporary art’s most prestigious festival. This year, after a process laden with complication and controversy typical of the second Trump administration’s cultural efforts, the United States picked the 55-year-old sculptor Alma Allen. He filled a series of rooms with quiet, abstract shapes, including an onyx boulder with a wavy surface, a folded sheet of scuffed bronze, and a standing oval of marshmallowish marble. The work was neither magnificent nor hideous; my main reaction was to note my lack of one. But confusion, then annoyance, rose as I read the plaque by the exit, which was filled with more than 800 words of artspeak so pretentious that it made Jacques Derrida sound like ChatGPT. “We are at a critical moment in culture,” wrote the pavilion’s curator, Jeffrey Uslip. He was referring to …