Biennial culture is already almost irrelevant, because so many more people are providing so many better opportunities for artists to exhibit their work.

Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.

Of all the biennials, triennials, quadrennials, internationals, and massive group shows, Documenta, established in 1955 and held once every five years in Kassel, Germany, is seen as the most serious. A statement show.

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

Art schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.