Author: Jerry Saltz

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art thinking that except for their tremendous gardens that the English are not primarily visual artists and are in nearly unsurpassable ways literary.

Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.

The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none – not one – of his ideas about subject-matter surface color composition touch scale form or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly decisively for good.

Artschwager's art always involves looking closely at surfaces questions what an object is wants to make you forget the name of the thing you're looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.

Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public out in the open.

Those who love him love that he sells the most art they take it as a point of faith that this proves Kinkade is the best. But his fans don't only rely on this supply-and-demand justification. They go back to values.

Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still over the past decade its audience has hugely grown and that's irked those outside the art world who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

If the Frieze Art Fair catches on I imagine at least two great things happening. First we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.

A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself – something almost inhuman.

Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties stays in the same handful of hotels eats at the same no-star restaurants and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.

Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open tall-ceilinged super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures should the need arise. It has arisen.