" Like a lot of people, I also hate what the market has done to the experience of art, substituting the verdict of cash for every other judgment. But when I first heard that this year’s Biennial would be heavy on humble art, I winced. Small potatoes is a dish that the art world circles back to every decade or so, usually out of revulsion against a gluttonous market. The go-go gallery salesrooms of the 1960s led to the rise of deliberately unsalable performance art and earthworks. And the 1993 Biennial, the first to follow the Reagan-Bush era, featured work that its catalog solemnly promised “deliberately renounces success and power in favor of the degraded and the dysfunctional.

And then there is today’s wave of success-renouncing, degradation-favoring art, much of which takes the form of listless flotsam-assemblage sculpture, things built from chunks of Styrofoam, torn cardboard or bits of twisted wire. It’s piled together with some measure of deliberation, but who can tell how much? Its heart may be in the right place, but it emits an awfully faint pulse.”