The consequences of the secularization of art

have taken some 700 years to reveal themselves to their fullest extent. It is only with the advent of postmodernism that the full meaning of art's dissociation from the sacred becomes manifest.

Modernism attempted to overcome relativism or, at least keep it at bay, by making a fetish of form. It failed because form only achieves real significance in service to the sacred not as an end in itself. By the late 1950s the exhaustion of a formalism devoid of symbolic content showed itself in the banality of the minimalist object and the equally sterile opticality of postpainterly abstraction.

After decades of Dadaist proclamations of the death of art, art's actual end seemed impending. It turned out however that the aesthetic frame could be separated from and made independent of aesthetic criteria.  This was the fundamental lesson of Pop art, and it became the foundational principle of postmodernism.  Art was saved from extinction by a sleight of hand that enabled it to persist as anti-art art.

Postmodernism is the formalization of formlessness. Aesthetic criteria persist in postmodernism in inverted form, as conventions to be ceaselessly invoked and willfully transgressed.  This explains why performance is so central to postmodernism, for ultimately postmodernism is but an endless carnival procession of displays of the violation of good form, a cult of flagrant ignobility.

If art will not serve the sacred, it will serve the unholy, but the unholy is parasitic, and to sustain itself it must keep conjuring the image of the sacred long after the sacred has ceased to have any real presence.

The desacralization of the sacred object,

Paul McCarthy, Complex Pile, 2007

which took the form of its transformation into art, gave art access to possibilities that could no be realized as long as art remained bound to tradition. The ability to exploit these possibilities appeared, initially, to inject new vigor into art. Untethered from its religious obligations, art became a source of novelties and sensations. 

It took a while for the consequences of this putative liberation to make themselves felt, but by the mid-twentieth century it had become readily apparent that in the pursuit of novelty, art had forged a path to banality. 

Art history has created a false image of continuity between the sacred object and the art object, subsuming both into the profane temporality of linear progression. It has forced them to share a history despite their being entirely different species. Indeed, the sacred object, as a symbol of the absolute and the eternal, only has meaning outside the flux of history. The profane art object is from its inception subject to the vapid exigencies of fashion. 

The emptying out of art, its diminution into mere cipher of exchange value, was for a time covered up by the supposed heroism of an avant-garde at war with outworn academic ideals.  But once the modernist moment was over, it was plain for all to see that the putative liberation of art from tradition was the prelude to its abjection.

Finally, with the advent of the readymade and the objects and attitudes it spawned, art dissolves in and becomes one with its commodity-glutted profane milieu. The appropriation of the banal does not close the gap between "art" and "life" because that gap was opened by modernity, when it replaced the masterful and sacralized production of everyday objects by industrial fabrication and artisans by coerced and alienated laborers. High and low were sundered when the High (the transcendent) was removed from the lives of the low. No purely artistic maneuver could restore that connection. The theatrics of the readymade do not overcome the disjunction of high and low, art and life. They merely reveal the insignificance and superfluity of art when it no longer has a sacred purpose and is reduced to making a spectacle out of its own debasement. 

Early modernists like Mallarmé did not envisage this. Art was supposed to redeem the squalor of modern life. Instead, it became part of it.

Rodchenko's monochromes proletarianize painting

by making the painting of a painting indistinguishable from the painting of a wall. And yet, with repetition, the meaning of this gesture, so radical in its implications, is inverted, and the monochrome becomes instead the sign of an extreme aestheticism. In this, I think one glimpses how modernism failed: it was meant to be a transitional aesthetic, a bridge to a future in which art would be reunited with everyday craft, as it had been in the preindustrial past. But this future never came and, with repetition, modernism’s radical gestures became mannerisms.

We might, no doubt,

find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass or all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of our boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. The bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as splendid as the swords of an army. The bore is stronger and more joyous than we are; he is a demi-god-nay, he is a god. For it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration of things; to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as red as the first.

G.K. Chesterton, “On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small“

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

G.K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland”

Once you get past the period rhetoric

about taking art out of the galleries that surrounds Earth/Land art, it becomes possible to detect in it a nostalgia for the kind of muscular, heroic, infrastructure building that once defined American modernity. The odd thing, looking back at this type of work with the knowledge of America's subsequent deindustrialization, is that there were artists in the '70s who were already sensing the shift. For it is precisely at the moment that a technology or a set of technological practices are becoming obsolete that they become available to artists as creative tools.

The '70s in America were the twilight of the New Deal era and the beginning the neoliberal asset stripping of the economy. Today, America produces nothing but speculative financial instruments and strained Hollywood fantasies. 

What was in the process of being "dematerialized" in the course of the '70s was the American economy itself. Art followed suit. As it always does. 

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.

It is difficult to comprehend

what was lost when our experience of the world was subjugated to scientific method. The mere possibility of revelation is banished. All traffic between the world of the senses and the eternal world comes to a halt. Nullifying thousands of years of mystical experience, Kant declares the thing-in-itself radically unknowable, and in so doing imposes the limit of rational inquiry as the limit of all knowledge. This is the moment the modern world is born.

A fundamental flaw in Marxist thinking

is the assumption that oppression disposes to insurrection. But the habitus of the working class tends to fatalism, not self-assertion. The rise of the bourgeoisie and its overthrow of the nobility did not presage a similar path of development for the proletariat. There is a profound difference, an asymmetry, between the experience of the rising bourgeoisie, whose expanding economic power gave it the self-confidence to gain power, and the experience of the working class, which knows only precariousness and learns from history only the futility of revolt.

Marx' own theory of alienation ought to have helped him understand why the proletariat could never become a revolutionary class. The worker, having estranged his labor must always encounter its product as the hostile, intimidating power of capital. The working-class, despite being the productive class, is barred from gaining a sense of its own productivity because it always experiences its productivity as that of the Other, as a force of dispossession, as a curse.

Unlike the bourgeois, the worker encounters in the world only evidence of his disposability. This is why worker psychology is a psychology of adaptation, fatalism, resentment but almost never of revolutionary consciousness. It is not ideology that renders the working-class docile. Alienation has already dispossessed the working-class of agency at the site of work before ideology naturalizes impotence. Inverting Marx, we could say that it is precisely because the workers work that they cannot acquire revolutionary consciousness. Work is the killer not the instigator of revolutionary consciousness. 

The imaginary tennis match

 

staged by the roving troupe of mimes at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up is the perfect allegory of what contemporary art is about: poseurs giving poseurs the opportunity to relish their exceptional acuity. In art as in the larger economy, the separation of value from labor required the transformation of vacuity into commodity. This took something like 40 years to accomplish, essentially the interval between Duchamp's introduction of the readymade and the Pop artists' exploitation of its potential. The readymade entered art as a tiny, almost imperceptible black hole. But it eventually swallowed up everything around it because in the absence of a sanctified purpose, art has no purpose and art about nothing must become nothing posing as art.