Author: Jerry Saltz

Many art-worlders have an if-you-say-so approach to art: Everyone is so scared of missing out on the next hot artist that it's never clear whether people are liking work because they like it or because other people do. Everyone is keeping up with the Joneses and there are more Joneses than ever.

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992 an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling money was scarce and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings performance art John Cage Joseph Beuys and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile a new art world was coming into being.

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations that tries to transform decay into something generative that is replicative in a baroque way that isn't about progress and wants to – as Walt Whitman put it – 'contain multitudes.'

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations large paintings and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.

Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.

Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste momentary glitches in an artist's work or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times however these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.

The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough good omens appear.

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades – even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs photographs of advertising sculpture with ready-made objects videos using already-existing film.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself – a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha – to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.