The "culture war" is an argument between fools.

The conservative fools want capitalism without capitalism, "free enterprise" and the Ancien Régime at the same time. Liberal fools want to abolish what capitalism has already abolished, the old patriarchal order, and replace it with something even more arbitrary and totalitarian, the rule of "sensitivity." The conservatives pine for the old master. Liberals want a dominatrix. Between them they have succeeded in reducing political discourse to a choice between inanities. This is why the categories of political affiliation align so nicely with those of consumption: Apple versus Microsoft, Tesla versus Ford, etc. Identity politics is not, as is often supposed, a strictly liberal phenomenon. It is the default of politics reduced to brand choice.

Art history is a fiction,

a compilation of nice stories people tell themselves because they want to believe that there is a logic, a progression, that links one style or trend to the next. There is indeed a logic, but it is a crude one, too crude to ever concern professional art historians. The logic of art history is determined by whatever at any given time and place captivates the rich and powerful. It is solely their whims that art, understood as art in the modern sense, signifies. 

The problem for the modern artist is that the rich and powerful no longer actually voice their whims or explicitly direct the artist to do their bidding. On the contrary, they insist that the artist should be solely guided by his vision, even to the point of appearing to be contemptuous of bourgeois taste. Like game fishermen, they want the fish they hook to give them a fight. In reality, no transgression that articulates itself within the frame of art can in any way threaten the bourgeoisie because bourgeois taste is quintessentially a taste for vapid novelty. 

Shocking the bourgeoisie and pandering to it have always been one and the same thing. 

Hence the masochism that characterizes the avant-garde's most "radical" gestures. The performance art of the last 50 years or so (actually going all the way back to Dada) is full of spectacles of artists subjecting themselves to torturous and debasing ordeals. Why? Because the closest that art can come to stating the truth about itself (that it lacks a valid purpose) in the modern era is to repetitively stage its own debasement. A positive art would be an art that served a consecrated culture and, therefore, would be an art that no longer had the qualities we associate with art since it would be bereft of the false autonomy of bourgeois art.  The condition of art today reflects the impossibility of either art or the society that encloses it achieving sacredness. Instead, they both dwell in banal sacrilege, and art is forced to vomit as aesthetic spectacle the evidence of its meaninglessness. 

The very notion of history is a product of the profanation of culture. For history embodies a linear notion of time only possible if one has lost contact with the eternal. Sacred art has no history. It does not progress. It can only be incorporated into art history once it has become a dead thing, a husk abandoned by the spirit.

Walter Benjamin’s reflections

on the impact of automation on the art object are pertinent to a consideration of what happens to the sexual object in the modern era. I think one can speak of both an industrialization of sexual relations and a sexualization of industry.

The “industrialization” of sexual relations is well-illustrated by the stream of drawings, paintings, and objects depicting coupling machine parts produced in the early part of the 20th century by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. 

The same images, of course, also depict the sexualization of industrial processes. What comes into view is the simultaneous sexualization of production and consumption. The commodity provokes something like sexual mania in the consumer and modern consumption acquires a distinctly onanistic character, at once addictive and unsatisfying. Simultaneously, sex itself becomes a form of consumption, no longer associated with (re)production but with obtaining the same momentary gratification that accompanies shopping. More broadly, we see the intrusion of sexual allusion into all forms of display. Everything is packaged to be sexy, and the consumer is incessantly distracted by one tease after another. This, perhaps, accounts for why in the Western world, the inability to focus is endemic. 

For at least a century,

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. (Photo by Alfred Steiglitz)

beauty’s most felicitous relationship has been with merchandise, not art. Today, one is more likely to come across something beautiful in a mall or on an online shopping site than in a gallery or museum. Consumer economies run on eye candy and are remarkably good at manufacturing it. The best creative talent is enlisted in the making and marketing of sexy consumer products. The fine arts make do with the unemployable children of the rich.

This was already evident when Duchamp proposed an upturned urinal as an entry in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition. The truly shocking thing about Fountain was not the nomination of a urinal to the status of art but the much-slower-to-sink-in implication that a mass-produced urinal might indeed be as as worthy of aesthetic attention as a Brancusi.

In other words, with hindsight, Duchamp’s gesture appears realistic rather than nihilistic. It acknowledged that modern industry had robbed art of its privileged relationship with the aesthetic. If modern art was to display the beautiful, it was obliged to do so by framing as art what was already readily available as commodity. (For comparison, consider how the products of Frank Stella’s prodigious exertions end up looking like department store bric-a-brac.)

How could the idea of fine art survive Duchamp’s gesture?

There was simply too much cultural and financial capital invested in the idea of art to permit it a graceful exit.  Divorced from service to the sacred, art assumed the burden of serving capital. With the readymade, Duchamp turned art into branding.

This is what the avant-garde ultimately contributed to modernity: a new type of commodity, at once empty and unique and, because of that of potentially unlimited market value.