Agreed, I believe abstract art still has agency “in the wider vocabulary of art.“ Though I like to make a distinction between abstract art and non-objective (or non-representational). Picasso, Cézanne, Braque, etc., were technically true abstract painters, abstracting what was once recognizable. Non-objective might be thought of as pure abstraction, more concerned with the metaphysical than the physical. Or the ‘stimmung,’ as Kandinsky called it, the spirit of nature. For me, its most cogent criticism now that is no longer radical is how easily it can be coopted within our capitalist system to become nothing more than decoration or status symbol—the artist’s intentions invalidated. Therefore, non-objective work is heavily contingent on context, like so much art these days.