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.
