In the new edition of X-TRA, book author and University of Pittsburgh contemporary art and theory professor Terry Smith provides the most cogent, self-directed, and compelling hypotheses I’ve seen about what happened last summer (with the confluence of Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and Muenster Sculpture Projects) (my travelogue here).

Here’s where he starts (emphases mine):

My reactions were, basically, the reverse of the reviewers’ consensus. I had come to these mega-shows with, I admit, a question that I hoped would be answered—in new and useful ways—by these exhibitions, and by others in Europe this spring and summer. Or, perhaps, as has so often, so rewardingly happened in my fortunate experience, the answers would be suggested by certain artworks that might appear within them. The question is a big one, having been wrought, during the past decade, with as much care as I can muster. A demanding question, yet wide open as to the kinds of answer it might attract. Here it is: Had the curators and their teams grasped the fact that the overriding concern of contemporary art around the world, the concern most proper to it as contemporary art, is the growing, alarming and inescapable disjunction—experienced by all of us living in the conditions of contemporaneity—between the small-scale, specific yet fragile facts of our everyday lives and the accelerating incomprehensibility, indeed, the often deadly incommensurability, of competing global world-pictures? If they had seen things this way, did they assemble works by artists able to display at least aspects of the extremely complex architecture of this dislocation, and by those artists able to point us toward the recovery, or discovery, of concrete kinds of locality, timeliness, identity and selfhood?

He lands in a Eurocentric place (I suppose the next task is to map an also-changing American position?):

European cultural institutions, including these exhibitions, seem anxiously aware of how they might look from what they imagine to be the multiple vantage points out there in the rest of the world, yet are increasingly ready to negotiate with these others. At the same time, Europe is, following the 2005 rejection of the proposed constitution, in the aftermath of a definitive moment in its own post-Cold War redefinition. Everyone of conscience senses that these two enterprises are profoundly linked, and is striving to understand how. There are many bleak prognostications, for example, those following “signature events” such as the murder of Theo van Gogh, the threats to Orhan Pamuk and the renewed rage against Salman Rushdie. On the other hand, the recent call by intellectuals such as Timothy Garton Ash and Wim Wenders for a Europe that moves beyond its current economic and bureaucratic forms to (re)discover its “geist” (a secular concept variously translated as “soul” or “spirit”) in a sense of community based on cultural exchange and artistic inventiveness is one sign of a possible shift to a more positive, constructive mood (see Wenders at www.signandsight. com/features/1098.html).