The painting, 'The Tribuna of the Uffizi' (1772-7) by the peripatetic German artist, Johan Zoffany (1733-1810), who became synonymous with very good portraits of the English gentry, is a masterful observation of pretentiousness. The painting which is a record of the collection of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in the octagonal Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence, captures the taxonomic concerns of Duke Pietro Leopoldo, articulating, as it does, the branches of art rather than representing a miscellanea. An array of the grandest of the Grand Tourists examine the famous works by Raphael, Guido Reni and Titian. An ogling crowd peer salaciously at the Venus de Medici, while George Legge, the Earl of Lewisham, presses close to the young Egcumbe as the group look ostensibly at Raphael's Niccolini -Cowper Madonna.

The picture is a comical observation of taste and cultural mores in late eighteenth century Europe, as satirical as any piece of English period prose. It shows that connoisseurship and art appreciation was just as susceptible to affectation then as it is today. But it also demonstrates, based on the Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's theme- less approach to Documenta 13, an intellectual coherence that is sorely lacking today.

Documenta 13, in its 65th year, is a monument to art world pretentiousness. Picture, if you will, a pair of bearded individuals engaged in deep discussion over Sam Durant's 'Scaffold' in which, so Das Begleitbuch tells us, is not a playground but a caustic anti-monument to the continuing history of execution. Picture the pontificating crowd around Lara Favaretto's piles of scrap metal which is somehow meant to conjure up memories of Kassel and Kabul, two cities chosen perhaps because they begin with the letter K! Picture the bemused look on the faces of visitors to the makeshift camp, 'The Art of Sahrawi Cooking', created by Robin Kahn & La Cooperativa Unidad Nacional Mujeres Saharauis, which is basically a ramshackle construction with lots of statements pinned to its walls. But according to the artist, it is in fact an ode to invisibility, highlighting the plight of the stateless Moroccan Sahrawi people. Look at the impressionable participants of Pedro Reyes' 'Sanatorium' which purports to treat urban illnesses in sham clinics. If any work stood for Documenta this was surely it. Not only was its absent of thought but it actively consumed one's time. Perhaps the most irritating experiences took place in Karlsaue Park. Here artists saw an opportunity to built small shacks and exhibit their puerile ideas inside. For this dubious privilege the audience was asked to pay 20 Euros. Song Dong, who can be an interesting artist, produced a pile of earth and called it 'Doing Nothing Garden in Peking' . The piece sat in front of the attractive Orangerie and took my mind back, in a longing for the past, to a visit to Sanssouci in Potsdam the day before. I didn't summon the energy to look closer at the mount, which I later discovered from the ever-helpful Begleitbuch was; 'an accumulation and preservation of waste. Built from layers and layers of rubble and bio-logical garbage, overgrown with grass and flowers and equipped with neon signs reading 'Doing' and 'Nothing' the approximately six meter-high mound ... is an artificial bonsai in an artificial landscape. Yet it is a living organism in itself , which shows that in the right context , even doing nothing can lead to the creation of something '. How very interesting! - 'Nothing comes of nothing nuncle.'

Javier Tellez' Artaud's cave, was a styrofoam tunnel, very similar to the ghost train tunnels I remember as a child, which led to a film charting the journey of an indigenous Indian in Mexico back to his roots. On one level it was an arresting film which highlighted the cruelty of the colonialists, but the explanation which insisted that the film within the grotto cinema becomes 'a propitiating (sic) space of non-passive spectatorship - Artaud's Cave rather than Plato's' set the pretentiousness bar a notch higher.

It was not all bad. Istavan Czakany married craftsmanship to a bright idea in 'The Sewing Room' . The many hand-made machines set beside the completed garments together with the absence of labour were a telling tribute to the sweat shops of the world and, more importantly, the unknown worker. I failed to see the one artist who held any interest for me, Khadim Ali, but his work requires more gentle surroundings and would, I fear, be misrepresented in this setting.

And so a day at Documenta ended with confirmation that when the art world is left to itself , without the demands of the market - the art fair and the auction - it becomes ever more self-reflective and self-deluded. Art created today can be very rewarding, and when objects are well-made, perfecting a skill or tradition, they can be precious and meaningful . The great difficulty with the type of work that is shown in Kassel every five years is that it doesn't have an end user in mind; it has the artist and the curator in mind as well as a group of cognoscenti who nod in agreement. Documenta is like 'The Tribuna of the Uffizi' , except that the works in Zoffany's painting have artistic merit. The malformed ideas and concepts gleaned from art school professors and French theorists that are paraded at this art circus give the impression of a sanatorium for the weak minded.

The trouble with Documenta is that the works are given credibility by their association with a cultured region and a successful industrial nation with a long history of intellectual thought and creative excellence. It is a well-established event and, in spite of the paucity of the art on display, the setting and professionalism of the exhibition is impressive. But, like the slow erosion of Western economic pre-dominance and apparent cultural supremacy this tail-end statement of cultural expression will lose its force. It was appropriate that my three-day visit to Germany should end here at the terminus of the West's cultural declaration, after having travelled through the wonders Athenian Greece, the Etruscans, Imperial Rome, the medieval , Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and Neo-Classical worlds in Berlin's finest museums and architectural monuments.