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Retailing giant Wal-Mart Stores' annual shareholders' meeting this week showed signs of the company's recent turbulence, as protesters assembled at corporate headquarters to shout slogans and demands.

Despite a court-issued restraining order, the protesters, including workers who are on strike, decried low wages and called for better safety procedures for supply-chain workers. And some of their views were heard inside the meeting, as well.

The strikers were in Bentonville, Ark., with the support of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and the labor group OUR Walmart.

Inside the meeting, the lineup of speakers included "former Bangladesh child garment worker turned activist Kalpona Akter, as Jacqueline Froelich reports for Newscast, from Arkansas member station KUAF.

Akter took the stage to deliver a speech recommending the adoption of Proposal No. 5, a measure that would give shareholders of 10 percent of common stock the ability to call a special meeting. Such meetings would be useful, she said, in crafting responses to incidents such as the recent collapse of the the Rana Plaza garment factory complex, which killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh.

After that tragedy, several large European clothing companies said they will band together to create a program for inspecting factories and ensuring safety upgrades to protect workers. Last month, Wal-Mart said it would not be part of that effort, preferring instead to create its own plan, as The Two Way reported.

That didn't satisfy Akter, who noted that repairs that would make the company's factories safer had been deemed too expensive, despite equaling "just two tenths of 1 percent of the company's profit last year."

"Forgive me, but for years every time there's a tragedy Wal-Mart officials have made promises to improve the terrible conditions in my country's garment factories, yet the tragedies continue," Akter said. "With all due respect, the time for empty promises is over."

Wal-Mart employs more than 2 million people around the world, according to the company. It generated sales of around $466 billion in fiscal year 2013. Friday, Wal-Mart executives unveiled a plan to buy back $15 billion in stock.

Despite appearances by celebrities Hugh Jackman, Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, and Tom Cruise, Wal-Mart's 2013 meeting brought serious concerns along with the company's celebration.

"This year's shareholders' meeting comes at a time of turmoil for the world's largest retailer, which finds itself dealing with empty shelves, labor unrest, bribery scandals and tumbling sales," as Daily Finance reports.

Two things jumped out at me when I visited the show "Encyclopedic Palace" at the Central Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale. The first is that in a show that claims, according to the wall text, to "initiate an inquiry into the many ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape our experience of the world," the work on display is openly indifferent to anything that might be called knowledge, science or learning. Instead the exhibition is a disturbing celebration of the work of mystics and self-styled visionaries.

On display are sance induced abstractions by Hilma of Klints, images from Jung's Red Book, Aleister Crowley's tarot cards, blackboard doodles from Rudolph Steiner and Guo Fengyi's Chi-Gong visions, among much else.

Is this the curator's idea of a good joke? In the age of climate-change deniers and unreasoned skepticism about human origins, I don't find it very funny.

Or could it be, is it just possible, that from the playful heights of the art world, the very difference between seeing and knowing, on the one hand, and fantasies of communication with sages on the astral plane, on the other, has become too difficult to make out?

The second thing that jumped out at me when I visited the Central Pavilion was the near absence of art.

There is a great deal that is of interest and value, to be sure. For example, the wonderful models of imagined buildings — 387 of them! — that Austrian artist Oliver Croy found in a junk shop in Vienna; or the thrilling collection of pictures made by a Russian tween, most likely for the purposes of his own onanistic pleasure. But these are stand-alones, one-offs, the private products of isolated individuals. They are not so much art as they are art's raw materials.

Art happens in community, in exchange with others, in participation with the ideas and work of others who share common questions, puzzles, fascinations.

I wonder whether the curator's indifference to knowledge and science is also what explains his apparent indifference to art.

Art and science are different, to be sure. But they have a common origin in our joint engagement with a shared reality; and each thrives only in the crucible of community. Where there is no knowledge, there can be no art. And where there is no art, there is not even the desire for knowledge.

A final note: there are a few works of bona fide art on display in the Central Pavilion. For example, there is Tino Sehgal's wonderful installation (discussed here last week), and there are also striking works by Tacita Dean, Ellen Altfest and Artur Zmijewski. For the most part, though, the show does not even try to target art.

It should also go without saying that these critical remarks about the show in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini are not intended to apply to the work in the different national pavilions. There is magnificent art at this year's Biennale. I especially recommend the work at the French, British and Romanian Pavilions.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Drama

Running time: 115 minutes

Not rated: smoking

With: Lambert Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azema, Denis Podalydes, Anne Consigny, Michel Piccoli

In French with subtitles

NPR's Bob Mondello reads an excerpt of one of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. He reads Beyond the Fence by Matthew Campbell of Salem, Mass. You can read the full story below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

The love of his life had been married for five years before he met her, and dead for five days before he'd found out. Clandestine lovers weren't notified in the event of a tragedy. The police and medical examiners had waited days before releasing the names of those killed in the concert fire to the public.

The paper had published profiles of the victims, and that's where, halfway through his usual breakfast of a slice of toast and a banana, the news had found him.

The funeral had been yesterday, but, of course, he hadn't gone. How could he look at her husband, and her children, and explain away the grief that had become as much a part of his face as his nose?

Instead, he'd come to say goodbye on the same grass she'd died on. He wasn't alone. Shrines ringed the police barricade. Flowers, pictures and candles were woven into the temporary steel fence, the flotsam of a tide of communal sorrow.

As he looked now at the lawn, it was hard to imagine how anyone could have been crushed in such a wide open space, but the fire on stage had been fierce and thousands of people had packed the event.

It had been a country concert, of course.

"You know what you get if you play country music backwards?" he'd asked.

It had been a day as beautiful as today, with sunlight streaming across their bodies as they lay on a hotel bed and listened to an old song she'd just put on. Cash? George Jones? He'd have to look it up. Funny how he wanted to remember everything now, even that.

"That's such an old joke," she'd said.

He'd finished it anyway. "You get your wife back, your house back, your dog back ..."

She'd pushed him softly, "Stop it, you're making fun of me."

"Seriously, why do you like this stuff?" he'd said.

"Because it tells a story," she'd said. "Each song has its own life, they create their own reality."

"Yeah, but it's a depressing reality," he'd said. "Life's messy," she'd said and kissed him.

As he stood in front of one of the shrines, he saw something glint in the grass, just beyond the fence. He carefully stepped over the guttered candles and reached his fingers through the mesh of wire and pictures to dig after the glint that was smashed into the grass. It was an earring, gold with small stones, long and dangling.

He'd never seen it before.

She'd have liked it.

They'd never given each other anything, every trace of their relationship had to be hidden: text messages deleted, evenings accounted for with plausible alibis, clothes washed to remove cloying traces of foreign scents. His only picture of her was the one that had accompanied her profile in the paper. The only footprints left by the passing of their love were in his mind, and he could already feel their edges eroding.

Without his really deciding on it, the earring became hers. He could see her wearing it, smiling at him across a table or from the other side of a rental car. He'd given it to her, and now he'd found it again.

This one small thing would bear evidence to their love, to its existence. Like her country songs, he'd create his own reality.

"Life's messy," he thought, as he turned away.