There's an old adage in the art world: you can't fake expertise. You can buy taste, you can commission brilliance, you can even stumble into prescience. But you cannot substitute credentials with enthusiasm, no matter how genuine.

Which makes the State Department's recent overhaul of the Venice Biennale selection process so fascinating—and so concerning.

According to reporting by the New York Times, the agency responsible for America's presence at the world's most prestigious contemporary art exhibition has fundamentally restructured who gets to choose which artist represents the nation. The result? Oversight has been handed to a political appointee whose professional background includes running a pet food store.

Let that sink in for a moment. The Venice Biennale—often called the "Art Olympics" for its cultural significance and competitive national pavilions—will see America's artistic face determined by someone with no apparent background in contemporary art, curatorial practice, or cultural diplomacy.

The Stakes of Soft Power

For those unfamiliar with the Venice Biennale's significance, imagine the Olympics, the World Cup, and the Met Gala compressed into a single six-month exhibition that occurs every two years. Since 1895, it has served as the ultimate proving ground for contemporary art, where nations compete not with athletes but with ideas, aesthetics, and cultural vision.

The American pavilion has historically showcased transformative figures: Robert Rauschenberg's 1964 win helped establish American dominance in postwar art. More recently, artists like Mark Bradford and Simone Leigh have used the platform to explore race, identity, and American history with nuance and power that resonated globally.

These weren't just art shows. They were exercises in soft power—demonstrations that America could lead not just economically or militarily, but culturally and intellectually.

The selection process has traditionally involved arts professionals, museum curators, and cultural experts who understand both the Biennale's history and contemporary art's complex ecosystem. It's delicate work, balancing artistic merit with cultural diplomacy, innovation with accessibility.

When Ideology Trumps Expertise

The Trump administration's approach to cultural institutions has been, to put it charitably, unconventional. We've seen this pattern before: expertise dismissed as elitism, professional credentials reframed as bias, institutional knowledge treated as suspicious rather than valuable.

But art presents a unique challenge to this worldview. Unlike policy areas where ideological perspective might reasonably shape appointments, contemporary art requires specific knowledge that simply cannot be improvised. Understanding how a work will read in the context of international contemporary practice, how it will dialogue with other national pavilions, how it advances or challenges artistic discourse—these aren't partisan considerations. They're professional ones.

The decision to place someone without apparent arts credentials in this role suggests either profound misunderstanding of what the Venice Biennale represents, or profound indifference to it.

The Pet Food Store in the Room

I want to be careful here. Running a pet food store is honest work, and entrepreneurship requires real skills. But those skills—inventory management, customer service, small business operations—have virtually nothing to do with navigating the contemporary art world's complexities.

Would we appoint someone with no medical background to oversee the CDC? Someone with no military experience to run the Pentagon? The comparison isn't hyperbolic. Cultural diplomacy matters, and the Venice Biennale is its highest-profile arena.

What's particularly troubling is what this signals about how the administration values art and culture more broadly. If the "Art Olympics" can be overseen by someone whose qualifications appear purely political, what does that say about America's commitment to cultural leadership?

What This Means for 2026

The immediate question: who will represent America in Venice this year, and how will they be chosen?

Without the traditional vetting process—without curators who know which artists are doing genuinely innovative work, without experts who understand how American art is perceived internationally—the selection becomes essentially arbitrary. It might land on someone brilliant through sheer luck. It might produce a safe, conventional choice that generates polite indifference. Or it might result in genuine embarrassment.

The international art community will be watching closely, not just to see who gets selected, but to understand what that selection reveals about American priorities. Art world insiders across Europe and beyond are already asking: Does America still care about leading culturally, or has it ceded that ground entirely?

The Bigger Picture

This isn't really about one appointment or one exhibition. It's about whether cultural expertise matters in cultural institutions—a question that should answer itself but apparently doesn't anymore.

The Venice Biennale will happen regardless. Other countries will send their best artists, chosen by knowledgeable professionals who understand what's at stake. Those pavilions will generate conversation, critical attention, and cultural capital.

And America? We'll send whoever gets chosen by someone whose primary qualification appears to be political alignment.

Perhaps it will work out. Perhaps instinct and fresh perspective will somehow compensate for lack of experience. Perhaps the art world's concerns are overblown, and expertise is less essential than we think.

But I wouldn't bet on it. And more importantly, we shouldn't have to.

When the "Art Olympics" come around, you send your best team with your best coaches. You don't hand the selection process to someone who's never played the game and hope for the best.

That's not strategy. That's not even ideology. It's just negligence dressed up as populism—and American art deserves better.