I wasn't always a fan of his, but I think Robert Hughes nailed this whole dynamic in The Shock of the New, about how a lot of modern art was attempting to force bourgeois culture to reject it so they'd be off the hook of the ethically tainted relationship with their market-veiled patrons only to find that they'd accustomed their market to being shocked and that shocking buyers was almost de rigeur for them deeming a work to be of potentially extended market value.
And now we have passed the line where nothing anymore can shock, leaving us two sorts of new: those who try to compete in the very crowded market for attention, and those who more quietly try to create original and expressive works in music, visual art, literature and film, but whose work must be sought out by the audience that still values it
I wasn't always a fan of his, but I think Robert Hughes nailed this whole dynamic in The Shock of the New, about how a lot of modern art was attempting to force bourgeois culture to reject it so they'd be off the hook of the ethically tainted relationship with their market-veiled patrons only to find that they'd accustomed their market to being shocked and that shocking buyers was almost de rigeur for them deeming a work to be of potentially extended market value.
And now we have passed the line where nothing anymore can shock, leaving us two sorts of new: those who try to compete in the very crowded market for attention, and those who more quietly try to create original and expressive works in music, visual art, literature and film, but whose work must be sought out by the audience that still values it