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 wilfully 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 has to keep conjuring the image of the sacred long after the sacred has ceased to have any real presence.
