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.