There’s an anecdote that sums up the reaction to the third Berlin Biennial: Philip Guston recalls meeting Willem de Kooning at Barnett Newman’s first show in New York in 1950. After a long silence, de Kooning finally declared: “Well, now we don’t have to think about that anymore.”

As the artistic director of “BB3,” Ute Meta Bauer has single-handedly managed to epitomize—and to extinguish—the curatorial style that blossomed at Documenta 11, for which Bauer served as cocurator. Any lingering doubts about the documenta(ry) approach—too historical? too museal? too politically correct? too

Since the mid-’90s, Marc Brandenburg has worked toward an iconography that, originating in a repertoire of personal motifs, has grown to encompass politics and public space. His small-scale drawings start from snapshots or occasionally postcard or magazine images, sometimes distorted on the computer before being sketched freehand. But the original compositions disappear into the material of the drawing. In the place of clear contour comes a soft line that levels the difference between figure and space. The presentation here multiplied this strategy in which the fixed, momentary exposure is