Art has always served power

but in the premodern period, power, though associated with wealth, was not its product. Modern power, however, is wholly the power of capital. And the power of capital, unlike the power of nobility or the power of the sacred, is a power that art is hard-pressed to exalt.

The real story of modern art, once one gets past the self-heroicizing bluster of the avant-garde, is the story of the difficulties that had to be surmounted before art could be sufficiently debased to serve capital.

For art to serve capital, it had to develop the means to make grossness glamorous. Adapting to an ugly age, art learned to glorify ugliness. Adapting to a materialist age from which the sacred was banished, art learned to glorify the blank materiality of the signifier. Adapting to an age of diminished men, art learned to glorify stunted tastes and feelings. Adapting to an age emasculated by the worship of technology, art learned to glorify passive consumption and what Duchamp called "aesthetic indifference." Adapting to an age in which filial piety had succumbed to the sway of fashion, art learned to glorify perpetual adolescence and impotent rebellion. At every step, these adaptations had to overcome the resistance of artists and a public still attached to canonical standards. But the process was inexorable. Eventually, under the rubric of postmodernism, the inversion of norms became the institutionalized norm and there followed the dull procession of staged, institutionally legitimated blasphemies that constitute contemporary art.

Here, finally, the real historical significance of the avant-garde was revealed.

Art in the service of capital is art in the service of shit or what Clement Greenberg politely called kitsch. To make this palatable, the avant-garde had to advance the idea that art should be integrated with "life." But what precisely did this entail? In 1969, on the occasion of the seminal exhibition Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Scott Burton blurted out the implications: "Art has been veritably invaded by life," he declared, "if life means flux, change, chance, time, unpredictability." But life comes to mean flux, change, chance, time, unpredictability only when it has been thoroughly profaned and reduced to profane existence. So the postmodern integration of art and life meant the banalization of art. The avant-garde aestheticized capital's excrementalization of culture. Consumerism became hip ritual.