The US could bring a Trump souvenir exhibition to its pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

The US national pavilion at the Venice Biennale , opening in April 2026, could feature a super exhibition of more than 1,000 Trump-themed souvenirs. The Game: All Things Trump is photographer Andrés Serrano 's proposal, submitted to the national competition preceding the exhibition.

The State Department, in charge of the call for proposals, must decide on September 1st which artist will receive $375,000 for the work, a smaller sum than the funds recently allocated to the most illustrious event on the global art scene. Most of the artists have already submitted their nominations, as they do every year; Serrano has made this public. The specialized media have come out to bury the publicity photographer, accustomed to scandalous records in his career. A triumph for Serrano would be the culmination of the grotesque style that President Donald Trump has promoted in his communication and institutional decisions in the field of the arts.

Furthermore, the upcoming Biennale will be extremely important for the United States, given that 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of its independence. It will also mark a complete about-face after two editions of highly politically correct events. The Venice Biennale is increasingly becoming a politically charged event, even when it seeks to present itself under the guise of artistic neutrality.

And at home? Anticipation is also high for the call for applications to the Argentine competition, which, according to rumors , is moving forward and will arrive in a few weeks. The ticking clock has already begun: the artists and their respective curators, applicants to the Foreign Ministry's competition, must present their projects in the coming months and then complete them: the work must be installed in Venice by April. Expectation is not synonymous with enthusiasm , if we recall the less-than-edifying recommendation of then-Foreign Minister Diana Mondino at the press conference announcing the last submission, for late 2023. She didn't even name the winner, Luciana Lamothe, and concluded with the words , "And let's hope the next submission is cheaper." Javier Milei's government wasn't in charge of that competition, as it had just taken office, but it should have implemented it in a timely manner. It wasn't resolved without private resources that came to the rescue of the production in the final stretch.

This year, according to sources from the Foreign Ministry, the feat of keeping up with the expenses for the pavilion in the Arsenals sector has been achieved. But what's new is that the project will be produced with private participation , in a kind of joint venture . To begin with, it will be organized in conjunction with the Secretariat of Culture, headed by Leo Cifelli, a man in Karina Milei's inner circle. Traditionally, the two areas were not cross-cutting for Venice. But the project will also have private financing. This unprecedented formula It was already thoroughly and secretly tested at the recent Architecture Biennial , and the submission process was almost entirely handled by Eduardo Costantini's developer Consultatio. Since the state cannot establish a direct contract, the operation and liaison will be in the hands of CEDU, the Chamber of Urban Developers. The competition will follow the traditional juries; they assure us that the selection will be unbiased.

The initiative made public by New Yorker Andrés Serrano is reaffirmed by the fact that in 2024 Trump himself photographed himself smiling, at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, exhibiting the catalog of The Game: All Things Trump , the first exhibition in which the artist partially displayed his personal collection of Trump memorabilia.

The Game was first a pop-up exhibition held in New York in 2019 by the group a/political. More than 1,000 pieces of personal and partisan memorabilia, from the 10-foot platform that welcomed visitors to the Ego Bar & Lounge at Trump's Taj Mahal Casino & Resort in Atlantic City—the resort's inventory was sold off in June 2017—to the worn-out MAGA caps, rare photographs, magazine covers, and even a slice of his wedding cake. Serrano defined it as a display of media imagery and popular consumption surrounding a political leader.

Strictly speaking, Serrano is adhering to the government's new guidelines for this call for entries, which were formalized in 2024 and explicitly contradict the content guidelines for the 2023 submission. Proposals for the competition must "promote the interests of the United States," with special attention to "the artist's ability to capture the uniqueness of the United States."

A special section prohibits "funds from being applied to issues related to the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) program," which guided Democratic policy and the selection of the latest pavilion guests, who settled debts of representation. The explicit official exclusion/ban on progressive and egalitarian content is a personal obsession of Trump's and has been applied to all federal institutions and funds in 2025. That's a risk Serrano's proposal doesn't run...

In 2024, Jeffrey Gibson was the first Native American to be invited. Gibson belongs to the Cherokee/Choctaw nation, and his exhibition examined Native cultures from a pop and ancestral perspective, with ostentation and luxury in the use of beads. Before him, the formidable sculptor Simone Leigh, also the first African American in the US pavilion, whose monumental works won the Golden Lion in 2022. The State Department's choice of The Game for the US pavilion at the Biennale, a sober classical building in the center of the most central street of the Giardini, would be abominable. It would undoubtedly stimulate hordes of curious onlookers—and before that, the rejection of the small community of Venetian residents, who this year already actively fought against the Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez wedding. The exhibition will be a good test of how far the government is willing to take the cultural battle—and completely into ridicule.

The idea would be attractive for a propaganda display, if Trump hadn't returned to the Oval Office. In any case, it harks back to the early decades of the 20th century, which was the century of the cult of personality: Stalin, Mao, Ataturk, and Fidel Castro were its icons; beyond partisan passions, the Evita Museum remains a temple of personal worship, albeit posthumous and now sweetened by pop and a vintage aura. What's unprecedented is precisely that this Trumpian cult exists contemporaneously with the exercise of power, and in a second presidency that has cut across numerous mechanisms of official support.

The New York exhibition was seen in European revisions in 2024: at the Groningen Forum in the Netherlands – under the title America and Trump – and at the Maillot Museum in Paris, in a section of the exhibition Andres Serrano: Portraits of America .

In 2022, the artist presented "Insurrection," his first feature film, a documentary about the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Featuring extremely raw footage never before seen on American newscasts, it was screened at the Source Theatre at CulturalDC, a countercultural space in Washington. According to some accounts, it borders on the gore genre, a sadistic voyeurism. According to Serrano, he wanted to turn the attempted coup into an "immersive experience."

Serrano's work, best known for his Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifixion immersed in the artist's own amber urine , has based its alibi on the ambiguous status of the image. Unlike words, photography leaves its ultimate meaning in the hands of the viewer: that meaning can be disambiguated, of course, but it can also remain suspended from conclusive judgment and accommodate opposing interpretations. This "Urine Jesus" can be read as a parody of the miracle of San Gennaro, another example of the divine transmutation of matter. Also ambiguous is Infamous, his portrait of Jeffrey Epstein with a sardonic smile, exhibited in 2019, a few months before the financier and child abuser hanged himself in prison.