• By Bert Rodriguez

"The true artist makes useless shit for rich people to buy." A rich German couple laughed. He said, "Das ist super!"

The art world has a terrible, disgusting side. And you can find it—you can't avoid it—at Art Basel Miami Beach. I was hoping to see less of it at the Rubell Collection. But Bert Rodriguez's takeoff of Bruce Nauman's neon spiral was a lighter moment in what was otherwise a tired, tiring, self-satisfied survey of younger artists following '80s appropriationists at the Rubell.

Here are a few things that are exhausted (either by serious overuse or simply having been born already exhausted) and must get a rest lest they endanger art itself: rooms full of art by Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Prince; Nate Lowman (scroll under Past Exhibitions), Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, Elmgreen & Dragset; Chinese pop painters; Murakami; Jason Rhoades; need Damien Hirst be said?

In 2006, the Rubell Collection's LA exhibition was the highlight of everything that went on during the fairs. Last year the Rubells put together a talker. This year's Beg Borrow and Steal was a major disappointment. It felt not only tired but unseemly. Like a late attempt to be trendy.

It had precisely two highlights, and they were next to each other: An un-obvious room that set Charles Ray's Male Mannequin facing one of Flavin's white homages to Tatlin, flanked by a rainbow of color studies by Peter Coffin on one side and a grouping of Allan McCollum's black Plaster Surrogates (sculptures of paintings) on the other.

In the next room was a video called Apocalypto Now by Jonathan Horowitz, featuring footage from vintage disaster movies and contemporary gory and extreme movies ("The Passion of the Christ," "Leaving Las Vegas"), snippets of documentary testimony by Al Gore and Stephen Hawking; news broadcasts of September 11, Katrina, the Bush/Gore election. Intercut throughout is the two-part interview with Diane Sawyer that establishes Mel Gibson's creepiness and insanity. At the moment Gibson announced, "I'm really a good guy," a toddler in a stroller started bawling. A sign at the entrance said the Rubells will buy carbon offset credits for the carbon emissions generated by the exhibition.

Outside the art there was a torrential downpour, and then dark, and then another one.

• Outside the Rubell, between downpours