Initiation

usually comprises a threefold revelation of the sacred, of death, and of sexuality.” (Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane) The initiate emerges from the initiating mysteries as one who knows. 

The symbolism of death and (re)birth figures prominently in these mysteries. The initiatory ordeals impress upon initiates the full import of assuming the position of man or woman. 

In a desacralized society, the symbolism of death and birth is unavailable, as is symbolism in general, and rites of passage no longer exist. This leaves each individual to “choose” his or her own identity. Today, this has extended to each individual acquiring the “right” to choose his or her gender identity. But because these identities are self-conferred with little effort, they carry little weight and are as easily cast off as they are put on. Under these circumstances, one never attains the position of one who knows. One remains a perpetual infant, not to say an embryo, arrested in a lifelong condition of fragile identity, anxiety, and bewilderment.

Initiatory death reiterates the paradigmatic return to chaos, in order to make possible a repetition of the cosmogony—that is to prepare the new birth. Regression to chaos is sometimes literal—as, for example, in the case of the initiatory sicknesses of future shamans, which have often been regarded as real attacks of insanity There is, in fact, a total crisis, which sometimes leads to disintegration of the personality. This psychic chaos is the sign that the profane man is undergoing dissolution and that a new personality is on the verge of birth. (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane)

Religious man conquers the fear of death by assigning death the symbolic meaning of passage: what dies is the profane man, to be reborn as consecrated man, free from the fear of death and, therefore, enabled to live a noble life. Secular man shrinks from death and is, therefore, condemned to live a cowardly, compromised, half-life.

Today, the West appears at war with itself, demolishing its own traditions and monuments. A desacralized and diminished civilization cannot tolerate the memory of its sacred origin. The legacy of the past becomes an embarrassing encumbrance putting to shame the spiritual poverty of the present.  But the willful erasure of the past does not prevent it from haunting the present. In the modern, the sacred persists as a haunting, as the always possible return of the irrational.

Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood.

Frank Stella, Gobba, zoppa e collorto (1985)

It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

Oscar Wilde, Letter to Bernulf Clegg

What hides under this aestheticized "uselessness" of art?

Well, for one thing, a rationalization and universalization of Wilde's homosexuality. But that is a relatively trivial thing. 

In the late 19th century, aestheticism and "art for art's sake" become a means to defend art against its crude bourgeois instrumentalization. But this defense is already a compromise. From service to the sacred, which the modern world no longer appreciates or recognizes, art retreats into "uselessness," a refusal to serve the grosser requirements of bourgeois valuation. Because the sacred has been dispossessed of value, its vestigial presence in art can only be (weakly) upheld by a fetishization of art's uselessness, i.e. its material uselessness.

Clive Bell's theory of significant form shows more insight than Wilde's. Bell recognizes that form has metaphysical significance:

Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; men change their institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another; only great art remains stable and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world. [my emphasis] To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy. 

There, in Bell's words, we have some indication that in its infancy, formalism was not the sterile thing it became after Clement Greenberg got a hold of it. Greenberg  "justified" formalism by reformulating it as a technocratic procedure for "entrenching" each art medium in its "area of competency." Making formal autocritique the focus of art practice was supposed to safeguard art from assimilation into kitsch. In actuality, this microscopic narrowing of focus ensured the complete desacralization of abstraction and, inevitably, its banalization.  This is evident in the utter vacuity of Frank Stella's postminimalist output, the precursor of most contemporary abstraction.

Nothing hastened the transformation of abstraction itself into kitsch than Greenberg's effort to remove from abstraction any reference to or suggestion of supra-formal content.

Michael Fried’s stance against “theatricality”

and the literalization of the art object can be read as feeble rearguard action against the impending symbolic destitution of the art object, feeble because it is constrained by formalist concerns and, consequently, incapable of apprehending that the literal object is the logical and necessary outcome of the desacralization of art.

The literalization of the art object (whose reduction to formal object was already an impoverishment) transforms it into something that imposes itself on the viewer as a physical ordeal. But this literalization, this debasement of the object, is inevitable once the premodern symbolic order in which the object used to be enclosed and from which it derived its metaphysical meaning, disappears. This becomes fully evident when the literalized, debased object is the body. 

Literalizing the body involves its subjection to endless masochistic indignities in an effort to establish its strict materiality and, therefore, it total availability to instrumental use and abuse. Chris Burden’s early performances are exemplary. As are those of countless others.

Why this compulsion to debasement? Because it reenacts the impoverishment that all objects suffer when nothing is left of the sacred and the entire world has been profaned and reduced to just so much matter, i.e. to pure quantity. The putative de-aestheticization of art does not bring “art” closer to “life.” It brings it closer to shit.

Fried's fixation on "theatricality" is a deflection, a distraction. Once it is deprived of symbolic connotation, the object cannot rely on anything but brute physical presence to make a fleeting impression. But this diminishment and eventual extinction of art's symbolic function had been in process for quite some time before the advent of the literal object. Donald Judd et al simply made the logical outcome of this process explicit.