Everyone thinks that Venice is sinking. But they’re wrong.

It’s on fire.

Picture this: a steamy afternoon in Venice. You’ve already gotten lost twice, you’ve climbed over more smelly bridges than you care to count, and you just want to take a picture of the Basilica of San Marco to show your mother. You stumble into a square filled with squawking pigeons and camera-clad tourists and sigh with relief. But there’s something wrong. San Marco’s on fire.

After a few seconds, it becomes clear that San Marco will not, after all, burn down. The fire is a reflection from a Plessi video installation “WaterFire” on the windows in the Museo Correr. For approximately three minutes, the windows are engulfed in images of flames, and then the flames subside into soothing violet images of the sea. The square becomes peaceful again as the blue hues dance off the gold mosaics of the Basilica, only to be illuminated by the orange flames three minutes later.

“WaterFire” is one of over 75 exhibitions that make up the 49th International Exhibition of Art of the Venice Biennale. The Biennale is a rare event in the art world; an abstract, fabulous idea that has both come to fruition and remained successful for over a hundred years. In 1895, an International Art Exhibition was held in Venice under the auspices of Mayor Riccardo Selvatico. For the first ten years art was exhibited in a single building, while now there are 30-odd pavilions and numerous off-site exhibition spaces. Since the beginning, the Biennale has championed new, up-and-coming artists—Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were introduced to the European Art World at a Biennale in the 1940s—while acknowledging accomplished artists with the coveted Leone d’Oro award for lifetime achievement. While visual art remains the central focus of the exhibition, dance, poetry, music and performance art have steadily been gaining ground in the last decade.

Every other summer, hundreds of the world’s most prestigious artists, selected by a rigorous international jury, descend upon the lagoon to show their work—work that often makes Plessi’s flames seem positively tame. Sumo wrestlers fight amid a candy-colored geometric background in one room, while another man tries to walk on ice wearing spherical shoes and a human nipple is transformed into an evening bag. There are bronze garbage bags and terra-cotta plungers, photographs of rest-room graffiti and gorgeous formal painting. There’s even a flying steamroller.

Unfortunately, the theme of this year’s Biennale does little to tie all of these elements together into a coherent overall exhibition. Admittedly, connecting circus posters with photographs of execution cells is a daunting task, but Director Harald Szeemann’s title “Platea dell’umanita,” (Plateau of Humankind) proves too grandiose to be noble. It remains unclear what, exactly, is the on this plateau: Is it the exalted artists? Is it the ideas of (in)humanity that they express? Or is it the Biennale itself? The implication seems to be that visitors are free to take their pick, or to ignore the theme completely. Which may not be a bad option, as the best the Biennale has to offer often comes in the form of individual spots of genius amid the general clutter.

One such spot could be found in the canvases of Gerhard Richter, a German artist who lives and works in Cologne. Following a classical precedent, Richter was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the Cathedral of Padre Pio in Foggia, Italy. But Richter’s response was anything but classical: instead of presenting the piou with a limpid Christ hanging from a traditional crucifix, he painted a series of diamond-shaped canvases with a dense, rich red paint. Shades of yellow underpainting shine through the red pigments in spots, making his canvasses positively luminous. The Cathedral of Padre Pio rejected Richter’s works as being too abstract, but the Cathedral’s loss is Venice’s gain. When viewed in tandem with Titian’s Assunta—located in the nearby Friary—Richter’s Rhomba appears as the abstract embodiment of a truly divine light.