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.

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. 

Duchamp’s readymade brings into view

an overlooked implication of the formalist reduction of the art object to pure form: the possibility, henceforth, of apprehending all objects, and not merely those that arrogate to themselves the designation of “art,” as pure form. This happened around the same time that the Futurists were proposing that the acme of modern beauty is the machine. For the Futurists this mostly meant the displacement of traditional subject matter by depictions of force and speed. Duchamp took the decisive step of replacing depiction by appropriation. In so doing, he forced upon art a confrontation with its own redundancy as source of formal invention. The readymade proves to be as formally engaging as anything labored over by studio artists. The nominative authority of the artist revealed by the readymade is in itself of trivial importance. The greater significance of the readymade is its revelation of the unintended consequences of the modernist fetishization of form.

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.

The reproducible photograph

somehow always reaches us as a cliché: it bears within the very economy of its circulation a fading of its effect. This weakness of photographic realism does not have anything to do with the aesthetic improprieties Barthes blamed for the ineffectiveness of atrocity photographs. Barthes' precious aestheticism displaced onto photographic "overconstruction" a fault that actually resides in the very nature of the photographic image. For the published photograph, even on first viewing, always intimates the uncanny feeling that it belongs to a type we have seen before, but it intimates this not because of any specific aesthetic deficiency on its part but because of its very reproducibility. From the moment of its publication, indeed, from the moment of its inception, the photograph joins an effluvium of banality.

As Walter Benjamin had already grasped in 1936, photography destroys distance but also devalues what it brings closer to its avid consumers. The stripping of the world, its pornographic exposure to the public gaze grants effortless access to the farthest recesses of the earth and even makes visible features that the unaided human eye could never apprehend (such as the gait of a galloping horse). But this unhiding of the world, this forcible unveiling—which is part of the larger scientific project of quantifying the visible—also reduces the object of its attention to a flattened and ultimately insipid representation. Photography becomes a fetish that magnifies the domain of the visible at the expense of what exceeds the visible. It functions, alongside other technological marvels, as a means to profane and miniaturize the world, formerly a source of awe, now diminished to what fits inside an iPhone screen.

It never occurred to Barthes that the very nature of photography implicates it in atrocity. Had he really wanted to find shock in a photograph he could have found it in the way every photograph, no matter its intention, contributes to the profanation of the world and the loss of its transcendent dimension.

 The true deficiency of photographic realism, like that of modern realism in general, is that it is impotent against the chronic unreality of the modern world that this realism seeks to counteract because this peculiar condition derives not from lack of forensic records of modern life and its atrocities but rather from the modern world's disconnection from the sacred. The modern world, reduced to a strictly material world ruled by money and infested by the human worms that money breeds, is a world in which nothing is sacred and therefore nothing is of any significance. Realism's attempts to give a true "objective" picture of this world only adds to its squalor by dimming whatever remains of the memory of a different world inhabited by a different and nobler humanity. 

The photograph, a marvel of representation, enters the world precisely at the moment that the world becomes unworthy of representation. The result is that photography proceeds to desecrate whatever still retains the slightest connection to the sacred, winkling it out of the obscure places in which it had survived and making a meal of it for the consumers of modern spectacle.

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.

Modernity is anonymizing,

atomizing, patricidal. It involves a vast uprooting from land and community, an unmooring from all the coordinates that used to sustain a sense of orientation and self-worth. The modern fetishization of identity is an attempt to replace by self-nomination what used to be assigned by fate, caste, and tradition. It is a poor replacement, as evidenced by the violence with which modern synthetic identities need to be continuously asserted.

While it is fashionable to equate contemporary identitarianism with a renewal of tribalism, the analogy does not bear examination. In the tribal unit, identity is bestowed by the tribe and marked by rituals that firmly establish the subjugation of the individual to the larger entity. In contrast, self-declared, voluntary identities are narcissistic declarations of exemption from both reality and social obligation. Nothing could be more removed from the spirit of tribalism and its reverence for tradition and ancestral authority than the glorification of childishness. Tribal societies do not tolerate perpetual adolesence. That's why they have initiation ordeals.

Rather than a "regression" to tribalism, identitarianism symptomizes in the form of mass psychosis the advance of the social disintegration inaugurated by modernity.

From earliest times,

humans have sought to model themselves after animals. Something more than a totemic relationship was involved. Animal idolatry offered a means to honor what in the human is more than human. 

The freakishness of the modern world is the product of a humanistic depreciation of the animal, whose worship is replaced by worship of the machine. 

Unlike the animal, the machine is inhuman without being noble. Marinetti, hyperventilating about the beauty of the machine is obliged to theriomorphize his automobile into a centaur and later on a shark. But the machine is not animal. It does not have a  mind of its own. It is insensate to joy or pain. It runs when supplied with power but is otherwise lifeless. 

The worship of the machine is the worship of death. 

To become machine is to become an insentient tool. The fantasy that machines can achieve sentience is a fetishistic defense against encountering the alien deadness of the machine. We humanize machines in order not to notice that they are refractory in their total, implacable indifference to everything around them.

The machine is in fact the closest possible figuration of death. And its use inexorably deadens the user.

The cult of the animal was life affirming.

Humanism seduced man with his own image and made him a slave of his own clever inventions. Now he dreams of becoming transhuman so he can be even more closely mated with the machine, again with promise that this will give him powers he could not otherwise attain and perhaps even immortality. Too late he will discover that to become imperishable by becoming machine means he has merged with nonlife and already perished.

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.