I cannot help but think that this horror [of empty spaces] that drives artists to incessant production is the apprehension that the time of art is over. Duchamp announced as much with his ready-mades but we’ve pretended that those were just provocations. We’ve read Walter Benjamin on the death of the aura and technology’s reduction of art to distraction.

But the aura of the artwork, which was its connection to the sacred, couldn’t be allowed to evaporate because, strangely enough, art cannot be commodified without some remnant of the sacred remaining associated with it. The paradox is that we need art to have something like a “soul” in order to trade it at a price above what mere goods fetch.

The last purchase that art had on something resembling spirituality was through the much-abused notion of criticality. That too is now used up thanks to the postmodernist conflation of critique and complicity.

And despite attempts to reinvent the idea of community through subcultural affiliation, community would seem to require a foundation that exceeds the atomizing power of capital, which ceaselessly uproots and disperses people...