the sacred persists, tenuously, under the guise of the aesthetic. Therefore, the work of sacralizing the world becomes an effort to aestheticize it. Paradoxically, this is why the banal comes to dominate art from Dada onwards.
A great deal of what seems like provocation (anti-art) is a test of art’s sacralizing capability, that is to say, a test of art's ability to aesthetically redeem the most abject material.
The artists themselves may not understand what they are doing. Very often they pose as nihilists eager to wallow in degradation (Duchamp, Warhol, et al). The discourse of “appropriation” is fixated on the destruction of aesthetic hierarchies (high and low, art and nonart) because this covers up an otherwise inadmissible (unmodern) nostalgia for the transcendent. But appropriation is at bottom a last-resort form of aestheticization, its limit. That is the real meaning of the readymade: at once an abject surrender to the banal and a last-ditch attempt to dignify it.
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