As the art world has got bigger, art itself has somehow become smaller – and, conversely, as the art world’s claims to real influence in the world at large have grown more grandiose, art’s real impact upon the general culture has decreased. An important factor in this crippling development has been the dramatically increased dependence, in much art practice, on an elaborate system of intra-artistic and art-historical references, and a growing reliance onever more specialized types of cultural literacy on the part of the beholder – the kind of literacy or meta-linguistic fluency that allows one to really only make oneself fully understood by an alarmingly shrinking audience, in a depressingly small corner of the world (that is to say, the art world).