Joke, spectacle at Venice Biennale

This year, however, Biennale organizers finally dared to acknowledge the past. At the heart of the group show, called “ILLUMInations,’’ director Bice Curiger took the unprecedented step of including three major paintings by the 16th-century Venetian Tintoretto.

Curiger explained her decision by pointing out that Tintoretto was a renegade, an innovator, a man ahead of his time. But in the end, as the juxtaposition made all too clear, his paintings simply have nothing to do with the prevailing modes — sardonic wit, academic obscurantism — that characterize so much of today’s art.

Curiger’s show, which is the center of the Biennale’s sprawling archipelago of exhibitions, is lackluster, although there are — as always — stand-out works. Among them are Boston-born R.H. Quaytman’s suite of small paintings and photographic reproductions, which have the silent, layered beauty of calligraphy in an unfamiliar alphabet; Christian Marclay’s 24-hour collage of film excerpts, “The Clock’’ (for which the artist deservedly won the Golden Lion for best artist); and James Turrell’s conjoined chambers flooded with changing colored light.

Gabriel Kuri’s set of sculptures made from dissonant, found materials makes a stronger case for this artist’s originality than his recent show at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. And I liked, too, a display of 15 elaborately finished architectural models by the exiled Georgian Andro Wekua. The shabby but architecturally intriguing buildings were reconstructed from fragments of memory and Internet research; they hauntingly evoke exile and loss.

Curiously, several of the more compelling artists Curiger chose are dead, among them the great Sigmar Polke; the Ethiopian artist and healer Gedewon; the embroiderer, mystic, and psychiatric patient Jeanne Wintsch; and the US-based Frenchman Guy de Cointet.