I went to the Venice Biennale, which is held every second year as the name suggests (biennale = bi ‘two’ + annus ‘year’). This overview of contemporary art can challenge the layman, so exploring details of the exhibition in advance makes sense. I read about the Biennale in Taide (Art) magazine, but the artspeak seems to pose more obstacles than the art itself. One exhibit, a leather-worker’s workshop, seemed as if it would be more accessible. What did the article say, though? “Artistic thinking (to use Luis Camnitzer’s term), seems in our decadent, anthropocentric present, to retain a marginal position, one that Maria Papadimitriou re-creates with a multi-level allegory in the Greek pavilion, with her rustic workshop selling the pelts of wild animals.” The article says nothing else about this work, so what can you possibly derive from these lines? A search for Camnitzer unearths a few pieces of information: he’s an Uruguayan-German artist, and he sees the art of thinking as ‘knowledge acquisition and organizing’. But why did the article plop him into text already overloaded with names and foreign words? I have no idea. As for words like anthropocentric, what do they add that, for example, “human-centered” would not? The critic’s style hampers understanding of a none-too-original point: this work is a multi-level metaphor for the minor position of artistic thinking in today, a time that the critic sees as decadent and too focused on human beings.