The postmodernist revelation is

Group Gelitin, Vorm Fellows Function

that to endure banality (the default condition of a desacralized world) we must find a way to endow banality with a hierophantic aura, finding depth in nonsense and heroism in profanation (the secret of Duchamp's readymade).

Postmodernism is the idolatry of the profane, the consecration of desacration, the aestheticization of the anti-aesthetic. It is the ideology of a society that has reached the limit of profanation and can only alleviate its self-disgust by turning disgust into a higher-order aesthetic category.

In the same vein, Deleuze made madness chic. For how else can a disordered society, uprooted from its foundational traditions, incapable of centering or grounding itself, countenance its madness? Only by turning madness into an ideal.

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.

Duchamp had shown the way,

but his readymades remained for a long time encapsulated and quarantined within the transgressive aura of Dada. With Warhol, the integration of the artist into the market becomes overt: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." From this point on, the untenable model of the avant-garde artist operating on or outside the margins of society survives only in fantasy. The critics, rightly fearing that in the age of Pop, their hieratic expertise was becoming irrelevant, did their best to ironicize Warhol's perfectly explicit celebration of crass consumerism. Intuitively (and unintellectually) understanding the logic of commodity fetishism, he produced work whose allure proceeded directly from its vacuity, which became something like an aesthetic singularity drawing in the attention of legions of hipsters eager to display their exceptional acuity.

Photography had threatened to make even the most uncommon objects common, at least as representations. Warhol turned this photographic devaluation of the uncommon on its head. He was able to turn the most debased photographic representations into objects of uncommon consumption. Cans of soup, bottles of Coke, the over-familiar image of Marilyn, all these and others became superlative luxury items via the performative magic of Factory appropriation.

Warhol was famous for saying that he made a painting of Coca-Cola bottles because the popular drink was something that he and the queen could equally enjoy. What he left unsaid was that after the transformation of Coke into Coke Art, only royalty could afford the latter. High and low, art and groceries, remained as far apart as ever but the cultural elite could now enjoy a new commodity called irony. 

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.