ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 approaches art as a Durkheimian social institution oriented towards the sensory enjoyment of form. It charts its trajectory from the Renaissance to contemporary society and makes a case for art in the spirit of the Renaissance contemporaneously being dead. It identifies boredom’s novel introduction as an aesthetic subject matter and analyzes its unprecedented cataclysmic paradigm shift as an aesthetic style and strategy. This drastic turn severed ties with tradition and pre-WWI culture, and transformed into a new social institution oriented towards radical novelty, disdain for the audience, and scathing deconstruction of former aesthetic techniques and themes. This new art became nihilistic, defacing traditional cultural icons such as the painting the Mona Lisa with a mustache (Duchamp and Dali), displaying objects found by the side of the road (found art) and sharing ordinary objects such as trash, bodily fluids, toilets, refrigerator doors, and objects draped in textiles (junk and disposable art). It was meant to kill the pre-war artistic ethos. The following cases within Anglo and Russian culture are analyzed: the Aesthetic of Indifference including Dadaism, Surrealism, and American postwar avant-garde, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Soviet Non-Official Art, and Soviet Conceptual Art, amongst others.
