AS THE ART MARKET BULLIES US INTO ACCEPTING CERTAIN KINDS of art that it vociferously validates (often super-size with meretricious visual properties), as soaring gallery sales and artists' representations in blue-chip global collections shush critics into catatonic aphasia and as mushrooming art fairs stand glowering over biennales and triennales (many of which come across as fairs in disguise), you look up to the Documenta as one of the last few outposts where the idea and not the Euro is the currency that matters.

Held every five years, the Documenta at Kassel in Germany has acquired a reputation for being one of the most exciting shows for getting a comprehensive picture of the transformations occurring in the art landscapes of countries across the world. Initiated in 1955 by artist and teacher, Arnold Bode, the Documenta was an effort to revitalize post-War Germany's art scene and restore the country's sagging morale - by opening the door to modern ideas and fostering an international spirit of camaraderie through art. The Documenta last year, from 16th June to 23rd September, in its 12th edition, was curated by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack.

Spread over nine locations, the Documenta 12 was curated around the idea of a direct encounter with art-works so as to "free individual works from over-determined and over-determining, stale, identity-based perceptions". Envisioning a new model of inspired spectatorship, the curators had tried to construct a show that drew from an informal approach to cultural education. Was this a well-considered position or was it a way of legitimizing intellectual languor? Though the absence of detailed gallery-notes that generally go with the art - which set the context and discuss the quality of the artist's intervention - proved to be a great obstacle in responding substantially to the works on view, the curatorial gambit did lead to a model of appreciation and interaction which was both popular and democratic (Alas, it came with all the problems accompanying these categories).

The Schloss Wilhelmshohe, a neoclassical castle housing a museum with a superb collection of Rembrandts and Cranachs, showed, among other works, medieval lacquerwork panels and porcelains from China, Mughal miniatures, Company paintings, Kalighat paintings and calligraphic work by 16th century Persian Haddschi Maqsud At-Tabrizi, which recorded his journey to India. As an attempt at playing off diverse visual environments and expressive contexts, the experience yielded rich dividends - viewers could create rich maps of cultural influences and enrich and complement their world-views, Euro-centric or Post-colonial, whichever they might be.

Among the many exciting opportunities that an event like the Documenta holds out is the chance to play the role of a curator - as you move amongst the hundreds of works on display, you can mentally tick works that suggest their capacity to enter into intimate conversations, that enhance each other's presence by critically relating to shared concepts or processes by creating an enabling network of family resemblances (which as Wittgenstein tells us is as much about differences as about similarities). Sheela Gowda's exquisite installation in the Museum Fridericianum, And.,(2007), which had red meandering cords climbing up and looping down the wall and curving sinuously over the floor (in a room that had Atsuko Tanaka's Electric Dress (1956/86) and a seductively buffed but out-of-place John McCracken sculpture) spoke freely to Mira Schendel's sculptural tangle of knotted threads (Droguinha, 1966) installed in the Friedricanum. Would Gowda's piece choose to whisper to the video installation, Lovely Andrea (2007) by Hito Steyerl, which featured the artist's search for a Bondage picture, you asked yourself. You were quite sure though that it would want to engage with Trisha Brown's installation with trousers, T-shirts, skirts and sweaters that performers moved in and out of (Floor of the Forest, 2007). The 'migration of form' concept that the curators had proposed could lead you to make exciting connections between styles, materials, textures and content across indistinctly related histories and far-flung geographies but it could also make you come up with insensitive and under-imagined taxonomies. As the curator of the Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor, observed in his piece in Artforum (September 2007), installing Kerry James Marshall's portraits of Black men (who had died in gang-wars or had 'vanished' mysteriously) under a 17th century painting featuring caricatured negroes in the Schloss Wilhelmshohe only managed to be counter-productive: it trivialised Marshall's critique of the apathy towards Blacks - their misrepresentation and under-representation in art and public life. There was a lesson to be learnt here about the wanton leaps of imagination that could land curators in hot waters.

One place where you saw a spirited exchange taking place was the Neue Galerie where Agnes Martin's subdued geometries in River (1964) spoke to Nasreen Mohamedi's elegant spatio-linear distillations in a delicate dialect of mystical minimalism. Mohamedi's Untitled pen-ink-and-graphite drawings and photographs (from the '80s) complemented her diaries on display (from the '70s) which gave evidence of the exceptional co-existence of fragility and poise in her private universe.