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.

One of G.K. Chesterton's profound insights

was that in the modern world, Christian orthodoxy has not been supplanted by reason, as the naïve advocates of enlightenment had hoped, but by diffuse forms of credulousness. In the Father Brown stories, the priest stands out for being the worldly one, dogged in his insistence on rational explanations for mysterious occurrences that others too hastily attribute to supernatural causes.

Skepticism could only injure faith not supplant it, and from that injury issued the half-baked paganism that defines modern "spirituality."

Saussure's contribution to the modern profanation

of the world is the denaturalization of language. He turns the Symbol into a sign and the sign into a convention. The idea of convention appeals to moderns because it redesignates everything once thought to be sacred as a "construct" amenable to being reassembled into something more democratic and equitable.

We need to be reminded that ancient traditions held words to be sacred in origin. As René Guénon explains in "Word and Symbol" 

The philosopher Berkeley was not wrong, therefore, when he said that the world is 'the language that the infinite Spirit speaks to finite spirits'; but he was wrong to believe that this language is only a collection of arbitrary signs, for in reality there is nothing arbitrary even in human language, every signification at the origin necessarily having its basis in some natural conformity or harmony between the sign and the signified. It is because Adam had received from God the knowledge of the nature of all living beings that he was able to give them their names (Genesis II: 19, 20); and all the ancient traditions are in agreement that the true name of a being is one with its nature or its very essence.

The truly significant event of the modern era

is the desacralization of life and art. “Modernity” and “Postmodernity” are merely markers of the stages of that fateful event. 

With the disappearance in the West of the last vestige of the sacred, the triumph of materialism ushers a great inversion. The worship of the more than human is replaced by the worship of the less than human. Everything formerly sacrilegious, dishonorable, ignoble, ugly, monstrous becomes an object of cult veneration. 

As René Guénon observes in his essay, “On the Meaning of Carnivals,” (below) the “feast of fools” that was formerly a purgative ritual of strictly limited duration becomes in our era an everyday spectacle.

On the Meaning of Carnivals

In connection with a certain ‘theory of festivals’ formulated by a sociologist, we have pointed out that this theory has, among other deficiencies, the weakness of wanting to reduce all festivals to a single type, that of what may be called ‘carnival’ festivals, an expression which seems to us clear enough to be understood by everyone, as in fact carnival represents what is still left of festival today in the West; and we said at that time that this kind of festival raises questions which can call for a more thorough examination. In fact, the impression that emerges from them is always and above all else that of disorder, in the most complete sense of this word. How then does it happen that they are to be found, not only in our time, but also and even with a more ample development, in traditional civilisations with which they seem at first sight incompatible? If they pertained specifically to our own times, they could be considered simply as one of the numerous manifestations of the general disequilibrium.

We may as well give here some definite examples, and we will mention first certain truly strange festivals which were celebrated in the Middle Ages: the ‘feast of the ass’ where this animal, whose distinctly satanic symbolism is well known in all traditions, was even brought into the very choir of the church where it occupied the place of honour and received the most extraordinary tokens of veneration; also, the ‘feast of fools’, wherein the lower clergy gave themselves up to the worst improprieties, parodying both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the liturgy itself. How is it possible to explain that in such a period things whose most evident characteristic is incontestably that of parody and even of sacrilege were not only tolerated but even given an as it were official sanction?

We will also mention the Roman Saturnalia from which, moreover, the modern carnival seems to have been directly derived, though in fact it is no longer anything but a very diminished vestige: during these festivals, the slaves ordered the masters about, and the masters served the slaves. One then had the image of a truly ‘upside down’ world, wherein everything was done in reverse of the normal order. Although it is commonly claimed that these festivals were a reminder of the ‘golden age’, this interpretation is clearly false: for there is no question here of any kind of ‘equality’ that could strictly be regarded as representing, insofar as is possible in present conditions, the primordial indifferentiation of social functions. It is a question of the reversal of hierarchies, which is something completely different; and such a reversal constitutes, generally speaking, one of the plainest characteristics of satanism. We must therefore see here something that relates much rather to the sinister aspect of Saturn, an aspect which certainly does not pertain to him as god of the ‘golden age’ but, on the contrary, insofar as he is now no more than the fallen god of a bygone and finished period.

It can be seen by these examples that there is invariably a sinister and even satanic element in such festivals; and it should be noted in particular that this very element is precisely what pleases the mob and excites its gaiety. There is something here, in fact, that is very apt-and even more so than anything else to satisfy the tendencies of fallen man, insofar as these tendencies push him to develop the lowest possibilities of his nature. Now it is just in this that the real point of such festivals lies: it is a question of somehow ‘channeling’ these tendencies, and of thus making them as inoffensive as possible by giving them an opportunity to manifest themselves, but only during very brief periods and in very well defined circumstances, and by thus enclosing this manifestation within narrow limits which it is not allowed to overstep. Otherwise these same tendencies, for want of the minimum satisfaction required by the present condition of humanity, would be at risk of exploding, so to speak,and of spreading their effects everywhere, collectively as well as individually, causing thereby a disorder far more serious than that which is produced only during some few days specially reserved for this purpose, and which is all the less to be feared for being thus ‘regularised’. For on the one hand these days are placed outside the normal course of things, so as not to exert any appreciable influence upon it, while, on the other hand, the fact that there is nothing unforeseen in these festivals ‘normalises’ as it were the disorder itself and integrates it into the total order. Apart from this general explanation, which no one who is prepared to think about it can fail to understand, it will be as well to say something in particular about the ‘masquerades’ which play an important part in carnivals themselves, and in other more or less similar festivals; and what we have to say will confirm still further what we have just said. In fact, carnival masks are generally hideous and most often evoke animal or demonic forms so that they are like a figurative ‘materialisation’ of the inferior and even infernal tendencies, which are allowed to come to the surface on these occasions. Besides, each one will quite naturally choose from among these masks, without being fully aware of it, the one that best suits him, that is, the one which represents what is most in conformity with his own lower tendencies-so much so that one could say that the mask which is supposed to hide the true face of the individual, on the contrary reveals to the eyes of everyone that which he really carries within himself but which he is habitually obliged to dissimulate. It is well to note, for this throws further light on the masks, that we have here a kind of parody of the ‘reversal’ which, as we have explained elsewhere, takes place at a certain degree of initiatic development; a parody, we say, and a truly satanic counterfeit, for here the reversal is an exteriorization, not of the beings spirituality but, on the contrary, of its lowest possibilities.

To end this survey, we will add that if the festivals of this kind are more and more rare and if they even seem hardly able any longer to arouse the interest of the crowd, it is because, in a time such as our own, they have become truly pointless. In fact, how can there still be any question of ‘circumscribing’ disorder and of containing it within rigorously defined limits, when it has spread everywhere and is manifested constantly in all domains of human activity? Thus although, considering only externals and from a purely ‘aesthetic’ point of view, one might be tempted to welcome, on account of their inevitable garb of ugliness, the almost complete disappearance of these festivals, this disappearance can on the contrary be seen, by going to the roots of the matter, as an exceedingly unreassuring symptom, because it bears witness to the irruption of disorder into the whole course of existence and to its having become generalised to such a point that we could really be said to live in a sinister ‘perpetual carnival.’

The world, as symbolic enclosure

that separates form from formlessness, comes into being always and everywhere as divine creation. This is a mythical recognition of the structural necessity of the symbolic order remaining beyond rational comprehension or questioning. God is the navel of the symbolic order, the omphalos, the ineffable ground. The worship of the gods, then, is not evidence of credulity or of some sort of "alienation," but an affirmation of what enables culture to function as a refuge from chaos. Culture becomes a construct when it is falling apart. Only then can it become an object for analysis. 

The fools are not the devout but the sociologists.

Bacon did not ignore any means

to tum us away from Plato’s philosophy, the human preface to the Scriptures, and praised, expounded, and propagated that of Democritus, that is to say, atomic philosophy, a desperate attempt of materialism pushed to extremes, which, being aware that matter escapes it and explains nothing, plunges into the infinitely small, seeking, so to speak, matter without matter and being completely happy even amid absurdities so long as it does not find intelligence.

In conformity with this system of philosophy, Bacon urges men to seek the cause of natural phenomena in the configuration of constituent atoms or molecules, the most false and gross idea ever to have stained the human understanding. And this is why the eighteenth century, which has always loved and praised men only for the evil they bear, made Bacon its god, while nevertheless refusing to give him justice for his good and even excellent qualities. It is quite wrong to believe that he forwarded the progress of science, for all the real scientific innovators preceded him or were ignorant of him. Bacon was a barometer who announced good weather, and because he announced it people believed that he had made it.

Joseph de Maistre, The Saint Petersburg Dialogues

The peculiarity of capitalism

is that it is a system of production and consumption that has no equilibrium point. It is either expanding or in crisis. The regime of representation that the bourgeoisie instituted once it achieved power shares this instability.

Modernism, like capitalism, is self-subverting and novelty-obsessed. Contrary to what Clement Greenberg claimed, modernism was not an artistic refuge from the vulgarity of capitalism. It was a faithful reproduction in art of the alienating process that created the coommodity fetish by detaching value from labor and the set of social relations within which labor produces value. In the case of modernism, this process created the fiction of the autonomous work of art, which like the commodity fetish imbues the art object with magical "aesthetic" qualities derived entirely from within. 

More boadly, modernism supplied a bourgeoisie eager to burnish its progressive pretense a theatrical staging of nonconformity. It inaugurated an accelerated instability of style, the fetishization of unconventionality, the absolutism of fashion.

The impetus toward realism that we observe in early modernism is a naive effort at a democratic reform of the mimetic sign. The hope was that a more empirical, more democratic type of representation would escape the limitations of the old one. It was a short-lived hope that did not take into account the shallowness of the bourgeoisie’s purely pragmatic commitment to democracy and the fickleness of its tastes. Thus, as art became a commodity, realism gave way to a succession of other fugitive artistic trends, for the allure of the commodity requires the incessant refurbishment of its imaginary newness

The development of modernist abstraction is a product of the demystification of the sign. Once the sign is grasped as a convention, it is irreparably fissured and the signifier achieves independence. This is what the notion of “art for art’s sake” attempts to articulate. The material signifier (sound, color, mark, texture, gesture, etc.) is liberated from “meaning.” It is disburdened of its denotational (use) value and like the commodity becomes purely connotative, a screen for the projection of fantasies. Initially, it was indexical and symbolic signifiers that most readily lent themselves to this process of abstraction. However, the readymade and Pop art revealed that even the most iconic signs can be removed from denotational use and re-presented as pure, floating signifiers.

Modernism’s undoing, perhaps prophetic of the undoing of capitalism itself, is that the demolition of the sign pulverizes all difference and all possibility of aesthetic discrimination. Signifiers without meaning and without an assigned place in a symbolic hierarchy become “floating” signifiers, essentially floating wreckage. Modernism inaugurates a psychotic unquilting of the signifier. Liberal ideology tries to hide this impoverishment of the sign by repurposing signs into markers of identity. So Warhol’s Elvises and Marilyns are read as signs of their maker’s (and his complicit audience’s) "queerness." The old phallic signifiers are replaced by their inversions: one learns to idolize failure, flaccidity, and shabbiness as marks of a “transgressive” heroicized anti-heroism. In its fetishized form (as "identity") queerness hides from view the emptiness of a culture no longer capable of articulating any distinction save a distinction between jerry-rigged self-applied pronouns.

Identity is a flimsy peg on which to hang a sign because identity is always out of step with itself. Contemporary identities are never more than the hope of their own achievement and their declaration is also at the same time a declaration of the distance from their achievement. Thus, every self-applied identity replicates rather than resolves the fatal gap that modernity opened between the signifier and the signified.

In its terminal “postmodernist” phase, cultural production oscillates between a psychotic emptying of the sign (i.e. the production of froth) and delusional efforts to recodify the signt by turning it into a token of some transient identity. The figure that seems to me to best represent this moment is the shape-shifting cyborg in Terminator 2: Judgment Day after  he/it falls into the pool of molten steel. As he liquefies, he frantically attempts to recompose himself, mutating rapidly through the forms he had at one time or another assumed until, finally, he is overcome, vomits himself, and dissolves. His special power had been the ability to metamorphose into anything. At the end, he metamorphoses into nothing. This is the immediate future of a desacralized Western culture.

The distinction between

premodern, modern, and postmodern can be expressed semiotically in terms of the relative stability of the sign.

As long as knowledge is grounded in sacred revelation, the sign is a sacred symbol.

After the post-Renaissance triumph of humanism, there follows a modern interregnum during which the signifier is dislocated from its metaphysical referent and the sign is reduced to a convention. In visual art this is most pointedly evident in Cubism and what  descends from it, collage in particular.  Symbolism, and later on, surrealism, discover the “poetic” potentiality of this semiotic disarray. The most banal, ubiquitous signifiers encountered in everyday life are then found to be charged with myriad repressed meanings. Signs become symptoms.

Postmodernity marks the full disintegration of the sign, a semiotic psychosis. The sign is reduced to the concrete signifier, at once hyperreal and mesmerizing but, like the glittering mirror panels that clad postmodern buildings, lacking depth or interiority. The signifier becomes a “floating signifier,” which as Frederic Jameson noted, absorbs rather than bestows meaning. It is stupefyingly blank, brazen in its banality, unsettling in its aggressive shallowness. In place of the modernist investment in the sign’s excessive meaning, postmodernism emphasizes the sign’s abject poverty. The violent contrasts that define the surrealist marvelous are replaced by an undifferentiated aggregation of dead signifiers. Henceforth, anything can mingle with anything else. This is heralded as a democratizing of the image, a demolition of the distinction between “high” and “low.” In reality, this levelling project is a means to give the banal its mirrored surface, turning emptiness into fulness. This is how the readymade becomes the paradigmatic postmodernist invention.

Current woke virtue signaling is a desperate effort to reinvest the sign with unambiguous meaning. Dead traditions are turned on their head and reinvented as liberal pieties. Lameness and imaginary blasphemy (directed at canons and traditions long extinct) become cherished signs of hallowed marginality.  This is not a novel phenomenon. In the words of Sophocles “evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction."

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.