Twenty-five years is a mere eyeblink in the story of Egyptian, Mayan or even medieval English art, but it is a long time in the modern art.

Much has happened in art.

Not all of that "much-ness", admittedly, is compelling or even interesting, but the ground is choked with events that defy brief, coherent summary.

Most of the "1980s artists" over whom such a fuss was made have turned out to be merely rhetorical, or inept, or otherwise fallen by the wayside.

Is there anyone who really cares much what Julian Schnabel or David Salle, for instance, are now doing? Do the recent paintings of Sandro Chia or Georg Baselitz excite interest? 

The period has been full of conceptual art, but conceptual art makes for utterly boring TV.

On the other hand, there are a few - a very few - artists of the "neo-expressionist" generation whose work continues its efforts to take on the burden of history, to struggle to explain our bizarre and terrible times to us in memorable visual terms, and one of the most complex and rewarding of these talents, uneven though he can be, is surely Anselm Kiefer.

No less so is Paula Rego, a painter I'd hardly heard of until a few years ago because she was scarcely known in the US - but how strongly put together, how viscerally and deeply felt, are her renderings of bad parental authority and of the psychic nightmares that lie just be low the supposedly sweet surface of childhood!

It used to be that media-based, photo-derived art looked almost automatically "interesting".

It cut to the chase instantly, it mimicked the media-glutted state of general consciousness, it was democratic - sort of.

The high priest of this situation was of course the hugely influential Andy Warhol, paragon of fast art.

The art world is now so swollen with currency and the vanity of inflated reputations that it is taking on some of the less creditable aspects of showbiz.

Hollywood doesn't want critics, it wants PR folk and profile-writers.

Showbiz controls journalism by controlling access.

The art world hopes to do the same, though on a more piddly level.

No other domain of culture would try this one on.

No publisher, fearing that an unfavourable review, would attempt to stop a book critic quoting from some novel.

No producer would make a guarantee of innocuousness the price of a critic's ticket to the theatre. It just wouldn't happen.

But in art, it can. And since it can, as Bill Clinton remarked in another context, it does.