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You know what conventions are like. Everybody from home boys to schoolmates and work cronies gathers in a far-off spot in hope of getting some work done, furthering their careers, rekindling friendships, cooling rivalries and letting the world know that their group counts for something. If you assemble in a small enough town, you might make the local paper.
Well, Kassel is a small enough town to not rate a Lufthansa office, and the convention that comes here every four years or so is called Documenta, which makes some very big papers and all the glossy art magazines.
It did not used to feel like a conventional convention of Rotarians or arch-support salesmen. It used to feel, by all accounts, like the most important international art compendium in the Free World.
Documenta, held eight times since 1955, was smart and daring and-because it was in Germany, where Hitler had tried to do to modern art roughly what he did to the Jews-it was a symbol of the triumph of democracy and the freedom of the artist.
This edition, on view to Sept. 20 with 150 artists, feels like a convention with all those funny edges that tell you that, whatever it pretends to be about, it is actually about something else.
Documenta used to be about telling the world, especially the European world, what was significantly new in art. It introduced a still-ravaged Germany to what had been afoot since the Nazis, namely Abstract Expressionism. It went on to identify Pop, Photo-Realism and other movements at early stages in their games.
If it has lost its ability to reveal, it cannot be blamed for that. The art world has long since become instantly knowable thanks to high-speed media and the sphere's now-unabashed appetite for publicity. What Documenta can be blamed for is allowing itself to be taken over by a Good Ol' Boy network.
For years, the affair was dominated by the spirit and person of Joseph Beuys, whose works ranged from teaching politics to a dead hare to planting oak trees for peace. He was a first-rate artist but an artist of a certain odd stripe whose repeated inclusion tended to set a style that perpetuates itself.
Documenta hangs on a coterie of...