If there ever was an alternative to modernity,

it could only have been a return to what preceded it. 

Instead, the postmodern attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment was formulated as a leap toward some vague transhumanism—which is really an attempt to reinvent religion as antireligion, alongside the attempt to reinvent art as antiart, the old impulse to worship the more-than-human turned into a desire to idolize the less-than-human.

Because moderns are cut off

from both the spiritual faculty of apprehending the sacred and the ascetic techniques that enabled union or identification with it, they take pleasure instead in blasphemy. What is in vogue today, in lieu of worship, is the inversion of worship: vapid rebellion, deconstruction, demystification, demythification, critique. 

Unbeknownst to themselves, the blasphemers are the last remnant of the faithful.

The derealization of the world

becomes particularly evident from the '60s onward.

Drug use is not the cause. Drug use is a symptom of a receding world and of a facile (chemical) attempt to reestablish connection with something beyond fugitive appearance.

The paradox: loss of metaphysical orientation does not increase contact with reality (as science promises) but the opposite. When physics supplants metaphysics, the world is emptied of meaning, becomes insubstantial. Science zombifies world.

Consumerism turns the world into a garbage dump of disposable things and images. Disposability contributes to the sense that "nothing is real."

Like science, photography promises greater intimacy with reality but transforms reality into images. It virtualizes the world.

The demythification/demystification of the world undertaken by modern sociology turns the world into an ideological mirage. The demythified world shatters into fragments experienced in bewildering isolation from each other. (Christopher Nolan's Memento.)

This may account for why "identity" becomes a postmodern fetish. 

Unable to participate in a shared, consecrated reality, the postmodern subject compensates by sacralizing the self. However, flimsy postmodern identities resting on nothing more than narcissistic conceits do not yield sufficient existential assurance. Instead, they tend to induce "imposter syndrome." 

The derealization of the world and the self go hand in hand. They are the two sides of modern mass psychosis.

Modernism

does not eschew theatricality. It is hostile to a certain kind of theatricality, the theatricality of the ancien régime, the theatricality of sentiment and the picturesque. This is at the root of the idea of banishing "illusionism."

Modernist theatricality is the theatricality of realism, which is the artistic analogue of empiricism.

Realism is deceptive because it poses as honesty free from sentiment. But the real is as much a fiction as the scenic or the picturesque.

So modernist theatricality is a theatricality of honesty, the staging of unstaginess. And yet, it yields very odd, very stilted results, already evident in Cezanne, particularly, in his Bathers. The hallmark of modernist art is its aggressive artificiality, its voluntarism, which, if anything, is stagier than what it supplants.

Postmodernist theatricality is a late-stage inversion of norms. The labored modernist upending of artistic conventions becomes in postmodernism a dull and thoroughly institutionalized perversity.

Alfred Jarry once observed that an anarchist army could be just as disciplined as any other. Upon hearing "Left turn!" anarchist soldiers would be expected to promptly turn right.

Postmodernist theatricality is the theatricality of conformity staged to look like licentiousness, anarchy turned into regimentation.

No doubt, there are other types of theatricality. I don't think theatricality in itself has any bearing on the validity of any type of art.

When he wrote "Art and Objecthood," Michael Fried was grasping at straws. Yes, Judd's and Morris' and most of Smithson's output was vacuous, but it should have been possible to say this without the tortured invoking of theatricality as the reason. Fried, however, wanted to denounce the banality of formalism's inevitable progression into "literalism" without abandoning formalist criteria.

A cogent argument against literalism would have required from Fried a declaration that art is fundamentally symbolic and cannot be reduced to a dumb physical entity without negating its arthood. Throughout "Art and Objecthood" you can see Fried sidle up to this assertion without, however, ever making it explicit.

What was it that inhibited him?

I believe it was two things: a formalism fixated on "opticality" that foreclosed any reference to what in art transcends eye candy, and, related to this, the restrictions imposed on someone anxious to retain the image of a sophisticated, progressive intellectual immune to "mystical" ideas. And yet we know that at its origin, formalism was expressly formulated by Mallarmé and others as a refuge for what remained of the sacred in a world overwhelmed by crass materialism and the bourgeois instrumentalization (and excrementalization) of everything.

Fried's problem was that he was trying to stave off the final step in the degeneration of a formalism already desacralized by Clement Greenberg and turned into a sterile cult of formal innovation for the sake of innovation. Which means that by the time Fried intervened to arrest its slide into total banality, formalism was beyond redemption, and his only recourse was to propose as alternative to the vacuity of Donald Judd the vacuity of Anthony Caro.

Art originated to give symbolic form to the sacred, to represent what is unrepresentable. Dissociated from the sacred, art simply adds to the burden of the banal. It becomes yet one more demoralizing, ugly thing in an ugly world. Theatricality is the least of art's faults. Its true fault is that it has lost its once holy purpose and become yet one more agent of spiritual degradation. This is the truth that Fried could not speak.

In a descralized world,

the sacred persists, tenuously, under the guise of the aesthetic. Therefore, the work of sacralizing the world becomes an effort to aestheticize it. Paradoxically, this is why the banal comes to dominate art from Dada onwards. A great deal of what seems like provocation (anti-art) is a test of art’s sacralizing capability, that is to say, a test of art's ability to aesthetically redeem the most abject material. The artists themselves may not understand what they are doing. Very often they pose as nihilists eager to wallow in degradation (Duchamp, Warhol, et al). The discourse of “appropriation” is fixated on the destruction of aesthetic hierarchies (high and low, art and nonart) because this covers up an otherwise inadmissible (unmodern) nostalgia for the transcendent. But appropriation is at bottom a last-resort form of aestheticization, its limit. That is the real meaning of the readymade: at once an abject surrender to the banal and a last-ditch attempt to dignify it. So the readymade becomes, effectively, the closest postmodern analogue to the sacred object.

The problem with

any materialist philosophy is that humans are not matter. There is something in them that extends beyond the material realm. What makes humans human is a sense of the sacred.

Marxism is remarkably obtuse to what is in plain view throughout history: the overwhelming influence of religious ideas on human conduct. It won’t do to dismiss religion as “ideology” because that implies that Marxism has privileged access to a truth beyond or above ideology, which would itself be a religious claim. Like all modern isms, Marxism is a self-contradicting irreligious religion.