Some people complain that poetry has never been the same since poets were absolved of their obligations to rhyme and rhythm. The same people also think that since the 1968 scrapping of the Hollywood Production Code that regulated sexual content, movies have lost a lot of their sexual sizzle.
This belief -- that creativity works best within certain constraints -- also has its supporters in the art world.
Comparing a 19th-century French Academy masterpiece with globules of paint tossed onto a canvas by some 1950s New Yorker in his loft is perhaps too obvious an example; but the point is well made by "Annual 2006," the yearly chance for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT) to change Tokyo's artistic temperature by pouring in hot or cold, fresh young art.