The scandal surrounding anti-Semitic visual vocabulary overshadows Documenta 15, which thus discredits itself.

She makes it difficult even for a benevolent audience to engage with the impulses that should enable a different view than that which is well practiced in many periodic large-scale exhibitions in Europe.

The task remains to form a global concept of contemporary art that corrects hierarchies, ignorance and contempt without throwing one's own Western experience overboard.

It is also important to broaden insights that the Documenta itself opened up in earlier editions, such as in 2002 by the Nigerian Okwui Enwezor, the first African artistic director of the Kassel World Art Exhibition.

Without galleries

If we nevertheless try it from the point of view of the art market, one of the remarkable findings is that around eighty percent of the artists at this documenta are not represented by a gallery.

An enormous number for a major exhibition of such importance, given that contemporary art is per se – also – treated in economic terms.

Martin Heller, cooperation partner of the Kasseler Weltkunstschau and co-operator of the Berlin sales platform "TheArtists.Net", which supports artists who are not represented by a gallery in sales, states the quota.

Of the approximately 1,500 participants in the Documenta, only a few make a living from art.

For most of them, there is also no infrastructure that outlines the artistic career in this country: training at an academy, scholarships, first exhibitions in galleries and art associations, collectors who come forward.

If you don't sell anything, you count less, maybe even only considered a hobby creative.

In Kassel, you hardly ever come across a sign with a dealer's "courtesy", the "courtesy" of being allowed to present the work.

Consequently, what is shown cannot be included in a value system in which galleries, collectors, and institutions set standards.

This is a relieving experience - although the anti-Semitism scandal also thwarts this thought - but does not mean

that the works exhibited in Kassel were not for sale.

Rather, Documenta 15 sees itself openly and offensively as an exhibition from which sales are to be made.

However, the urgency of making art and generating sales is determined differently: the artists intervene directly in their living environment and change their circumstances on their own doorstep.

You need money for that.

A different look at art

The collectives invest it, for example, in agro-ecological measures in abandoned villages in Spain, which the Madrid group Inland has taken up the cause of, or in a project space and wood workshop in a slum called Lunga Lunga in Nairobi, realized by the Wajukuu Art Project. who succeeded in one of the most impressive works in Kassel with the conversion of the Documenta hall into a corrugated iron hut.

Or they support political prisoners in Cuba, for whom the collective Instar, short for Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, around the artist Tania Bruguera, is campaigning.

Most of the funds generated at the Documenta flow into social, political projects.

This also changes the view of art.