Take one part liberal guilt about race, two parts political correctness, and add a large measure of contemporary lit-crit speak about art. Mix well in a macédoine of whatever leftist political clichés are current this week and, presto! out comes Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian-born political science major turned curator turned art world star du jour. As The New York Times recently reported on the cover of its Arts page on February 12 (and then in long follow-up articles in subsequent issues), the thirty-eight-year-old Enwezor was recently tapped to be the artistic director of Documenta, the huge German-based exhibition of international contemporary art that takes place every several years and that opens in June.

The Times was ecstatic. Documenta, its reporter wrote, “is to contemporary art what the Olympics are to sports.” If the Times reporter had been thinking about rigged j ...

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