The art of shopping, rather than art, might be foremost on the minds of shoppers at TSUM, the Moscow department store, but they have a surprise awaiting them as they round the corner from racks of Armani Junior and Miss Blumarine childrenswear.

A nondescript white door opens to a huge concrete hall full of dozens of screens showing continuous American video art in a cacophony of images and sounds. The videos, some offering commentary on consumer culture, are part of the main project of the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, which is entitled "Footnotes on Geopolitics, Market, and Amnesia."

The biennale was conceived as five autonomous projects by eight international curators, including Rosa Martinez and Daniel Birnbaum, who have served as curators at the Venice Biennale, and Fulya Erdemci, who was director of the Istanbul Biennial from 1994 to 2000.

The entire fourth floor of an unfinished new wing of TSUM - with construction workers busily drilling on walls - has been taken over by the biennale, which opened March 1 and runs until April 1. There are also dozens of special and parallel projects at other sites in Moscow. Two special guests of the biennale, Yoko Ono and Robert Wilson, will put on exhibitions later in the spring after the main event closes.

Not only floor space, but also the store's sound system has been used. A lecture on the religious roots of the modern economic system by Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher, was broadcast one day - in Italian but with a Russian translation.

"The ladies who were shopping probably didn't know what hit them," said Joseph Backstein, deputy director of Rosizo, the state center for museums and exhibitions, and the biennale's commissioner. Nor, said Backstein, did Agamben know he would be speaking in a department store.

The biennale's festive opening on March 1 in the store's cosmetics department featured speeches by Mikhail Shvydkoi, the director of Russia's Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency, a branch of the Culture Ministry, city officials, and a U.S. Embassy representative. The American video art program comes as Russia and the United States are holding celebrations this year to mark 200 years of diplomatic relations.

The Russian government allocated 52 million rubles, or about $2 million, for the biennale's main program. Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of staff for President Vladimir Putin, writing in the biennale's catalogue, described it "as an important part of the cultural policy of a democratic Russia." He added, "We believe it is important for contemporary art to engage in dialogue with society. Our concern is not only creating an artistic context and a creative environment, but also supporting the humanitarian potential of art."

One of the biennale's most striking exhibitions is not in the main program but among the special projects: a vast retrospective of Sots Art, the Soviet underground version of Pop Art, including works that undercut the Soviet regime by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Surprisingly, that exhibition at the State Tretyakov Gallery also includes post-Soviet Sots Art of the kind that has been known to raise hackles in the Russia of President Putin and which provoked anger during the first biennale.

Among the pieces on display is a comic photo collage by the Blue Noses group that appears to depict Putin, Osama bin Laden, and President George W. Bush lounging together in boxer shorts like three drunken Russians. It hangs near a new video installation that includes a recording of Putin's New Year's address to the nation - set to a mocking laugh track.

The Russian Sots Art show segues into an exhibition of Chinese political art, including a roomful of irreverent takes on Mao. Russia is also marking a "Year of China" with a series of cultural events.

The biennale's main venues, as much as the art work, offer a commentary on the trajectory of Russia's development. The first biennale was held in the former Lenin Museum, full of busts of the founder of the Soviet state, with financial support but only cautious moral support from the Russian government and no sponsorship from the country's new rich.

Now the main venues are TSUM, which is owned by Mercury, a Russian distributor of imported luxury goods; and the Federation Tower, a skyscraper complex, billed as Europe's tallest, that is under construction in Moscow City, an area that will become the Russian capital's new business district.

Both venues have come under criticism. The TSUM setup of simultaneous video art screenings resulted in a mishmash with no sound, complained Moscow art critics. And many bewailed the difficulty of navigating a construction site to get to the Federation Tower. The critics also found the exhibition amorphous.

"The exhibition turned out chaotic and indefinite with the categorical absence of a clear idea and decisive meaning," wrote Sergey Solovyov in Noviye Izvestia, a Moscow newspaper.

Backstein, the biennale's commissioner, who first made his name on the Soviet underground art scene, also organized and served as coordinating curator of the first biennale and sees the venues as a logical stage in the development of Russia and its art scene.

"I had a metaphor that the Lenin Museum was a goodbye to the past and the construction site is a kind of appeal to the future," he said. "Then of course there's the relationship between real estate and art. It's like the East Village in New York. When artists settle there, then real estate prices go up and artists are kicked out and they settle elsewhere. There is a dialectic common to many countries of the relationship between the real estate market and art."

That metaphor might best apply to Winzavod, a former wine factory reopened as an art space to coincide with the biennale. It is the largest take yet on the Moscow trend of turning former industrial sites into art galleries. Opening night had the vibe of a wild art school frat party, with rivers of beer and bad wine and crowds trying to crash the gate.

But some exhibitions offered islands of serenity, even mysticism, such as "Veriu," or "I Believe," which was curated by Oleg Kulik, the artist known for his performances as a dog.

Backstein took the critical sniping in stride, noting the changes that have transformed the Russian art scene since the last biennale, when rich Russians were too wrapped up in 19th-century art or too worried about the political risks of contemporary art to back the biennale.

This time, he said, private sponsors gave $500,000 for the main project and financed special projects such as a retrospective of films by Matthew Barney. Janna Bullock, a Russian-born real estate developer who divides her time between Moscow and New York, brought the films - and the artist - to Moscow at the suggestion of Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, paying the $150,000 bill. Bullock has created a foundation that brought the works of 20 Russian artists to Art Basel Miami and she will sponsor Barneys exhibition at the upcoming Venice biennale.

Stella Kay, a Moscow art collector who recently turned her commercial gallery into a foundation to support contemporary artists, turned down his request for biennale backing, Backstein said.

But on Tuesday, she hosted a lecture for collectors and journalists by Roger Buergel, the artistic director of Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany.

And just behind the former KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square, Vladimir Seminikhin, a construction magnate who divides his time between Moscow and Monaco, has opened a state-of-the-art gallery to display his collection of 20th-century Russian art, which he often shares with the Tretyakov Gallery.

Now, said Backstein, Moscow has about 500 modern art collectors.

"It's the logic of consumption," said Backstein. "What is a rich Russian? It means you must have an apartment in Moscow, a Bentley, a dacha on Rublyovka, a house in London, a villa in Sardinia, and a yacht. Then you must buy modern art."