Not surprisingly, he is unimpressed with the 11th Biennale. This idea of how understanding arises is a core dogma of European critical thought. Art need not confront anything as an other. It can do just as nicely by making itself up as it goes along out of whatever is lying around. Watkins would have it more the other way around.
Art arises as an effect within everyday life.
Its not about looking out from the gallery into the world, its about making any and every experience over into something different. Art is different from everyday life, but it is not other to it. This I think would be a more productive way of thinking about the limits of how Watkins would have us think about the everyday. T he everyday in the 11th Biennale is a world of knitting wool and dirt and wood veneer shelves and dented garbage bins, but it isn't the world saturated in the images of the mass media that so fascinated wild postmodernism. Watkins has an answer to cool postmodernism, but he has simply ignored its walk on the wildside, which was very much about the media as an integral part of the everyday.