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This summer in Kassel, at the twice-a-decade art bonanza that is Documenta, the whole undertaking seemed, from certain angles, a last vestige of feudal Europe--a throwback to market day at the town square, where, under the shadow of princely architecture, stalls beckon with fresh goods from all over. Whether that's precisely their view or not, the organizers of Documenta 12, Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, have firmly embraced anachronism. Noting that the exhibition is "not simply a glass display cabinet but, primarily, a public gathering space," they have taken a long view of its mission, inserting historical drawings and a variety of textiles going back several centuries amid the requisite global survey of recent art. The results are alternately illuminating and academic.

On the one hand, commerce in the durable products of cultural tourism, and its connection to the sorry, extended history of colonialism, is--hardly for the first time at such events--a major issue. Conquest, plunder, migration voluntary and forced: this is a story recent art loves to tell--and to act out. On the other hand, associated themes of weaving, both literal and transnational, are treated with fresh interest and imagination. The obligatory question of how art assumes value is once more posed, but here, too, considerable energy was put into reexamining the consequences of linking artistic or curatorial signatures to images not otherwise recognizable as original; there are also occasions to measure decorative art against painting as well as--more provocatively-old art against new.

This last should not, it goes without saying, be taken for a nod to traditional values. At a pre-opening press conference, exhibition director Buergel was at pains to convey his scorn for convention. His feelings about the media were hardly less clear. "You are in the business of packaging things," he said to the assembled legions of journalists, "of making them, so to speak, ready to eat. We--art curators--are in the business of unwrapping them." Presumably in defense against preshow depredations of the journalistic sort, the roster of artists had been closely guarded, though the biggest surprises had already been revealed, if that's the right word. The reasons for including celebrity-chef Ferran Adria, who presides over el Bulli, the foodie Shangri La outside Barcelona, remained as murky as ever after Buergel spoke, as did the process whereby 50 lucky Documenta visitors were to be chosen--at random, he said--to dine at the restaurant, designated for the purpose a Documenta outpost.

Similarly opaque, particularly in light of this unabashedly cosmopolitan gambit, was the rationale for including work dating back 600 years and more. Noack, Buergel's lieutenant (and wife), said the point is to help educate a lay public, which knows, she said, woefully little about art. Sincere though she seemed, it's hard not to suspect disingenuousness when a small 14th-century drawing from Persia, for instance, is nestled between commendable but--to an innocent audience--even more recondite contemporary videos. But as the organizers' telegraphically short introduction to the catalogue suggests, "formlessness" itself--as in resistance to tidy explanations--is code for a slew of familiar references, from Bataille to Deleuze. The three notoriously vague questions around which Documenta 12 was organized--"Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? What is to be done?"--are drawn from the writings of, in the last two cases respectively, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and Lenin.

If Buergel and Noack's dismayingly familiar form of mandarin populism didn't initially inspire sympathy (as Holland Cotter noted in the New York Times, "European 'serious' often reads as pretentious to an American ear. It's a cultural thing"), the show they have assembled is in fact an intelligent and often rewarding achievement. And if it sometimes seems that they have a hard time moving aside to let the artwork do what it wants, just as often their interventions are astute, original and welcome. In any case, they have brought together a great deal of material worth craning to see, much of it unfamiliar and very little of it self-aggrandizing.

A big exhibition, with over 500 works by more than 125 artists, Documenta 12 harbors several estimable monographic shows, each distributed connect-the-dots style over its six venues--and none of them better than Kerry James Marshall's. In the Fridericianum, a grand, 18th-century hall that was Europe's first museum and is encountered first by most viewers, the African-American artist's Blue Water Silver Moon (Mermaid), a painting from 1991, has a stunning presence in a groundfloor room; the level gaze of its pitch-black subject seems capable of having arrested the wax cataract that is Zheng Gougu's Waterfall (2006), which faces it.

More paintings and drawings by Marshall are to be found elsewhere in the Fridericianum and in four other buildings, always in pointed conversation with neighbors. Most provocative by far is the colloquy at Schloss Wilhelmsh(ihe, an imposing 18th-century castle at some distance from the main exhibition site that houses a significant collection of old-master and antique art. There, two of Marshall's "Lost Boy" paintings of 1993, which feature grimly imperious, fathomless young black men staring straight at the viewer, square off against a stupendously odious 17th-century Dutch painting of two Ethiopian regents gazing salaciously at a painting-within-the-painting of a pearly-white, naked Andromeda. Just tracking the eyes in these three works is an advanced seminar in visual communication.