Hatred of religion

shows up in modern art as hatred of “illusionism.” Paradoxically, this hatred of illusionism drives modern art toward abstraction and a fixation on the materiality of the signifier.

But art can never become totally materialist, can never be reduced to objecthood, because if it is, it ceases to have a symbolic function and without symbolic function, it ceases to be art and becomes indistinguishable from every other object. 

So an art that seeks to eradicate all illusionism must eventually eradicate itself. And we get very close to this with the readymade. But not quite, because the readymade, whether considered as art or antiart art, still invokes the symbolic. Duchamp’s urinal is no longer just a urinal once it is “nominated” as art. This nomination bears uncanny resemblance to the sacralization of the profane object, which likewise may retain the external appearance of a quite ordinary object (stone, tree, pool, bread, wine, etc.) and yet be imbued with unearthly power. It is only in an art history dissociated from the larger history of human ritual that the invention of the readymade is assigned such disproportionate significance. The readymade is merely a parody of the consecrated object.

The readymade shares with the “literal” minimalist object the sleight of hand of invoking the metaphysical while pretending to abolish it. So I am in sympathy with Michael Fried’s rejection of literalism in “Art and Objecthood.” But Fried’s case against literalism it vitiated by the need to couch in formalist terms what could only be forcefully articulated in metaphysical terms. The idea that wants to come to the surface in that tortured and verbose essay is that art is art only to the extent that it serves a metaphysical purpose. Art is the transfiguration of matter into spiritual substance. And this and this alone is the reason why art cannot be reduced to a desacralized, profane object without ceasing to be art. Fried could not bring himself to state this and in failing to state it he revealed why formalism, which for a brief period served as a bulwark against the banalization of art, finally failed at its task and left the field to be trampled by postmodernists.