Marcel - all is not forgiven
When Duchamp submitted his urinal to the New York art whatsit he committed an act of genius, He said to all those bourgeois with their nice pictures
- "you think that's art? you don't know nuthin. this is art, and it's art because I say it is, and you can't prove otherwise and in fact the very act of me saying that it is art is art itself".
Little did he think or know that he was instigating the biggest commercial phenomenon known to man. Conceptual Art - or how to make squillions of dollars out of absolutely nothing. A few big dealers and so called artists just fix it all up and con some folk with a load of money who need to buy some cultural credibility to carry around on the glitterati circuit and who don't know any better and all the VAn Goghs are sold anyway. Now these guys are in luck, because they have the market sown up. But they're greedy like all sorts of people with lots of money so they need to find the best way to make more and more quickly. Duchamp to the rescue. "We'll just take whatever we like and call it Art and sell it for lots of money - no-one cares - they just want to know the cost, and no-one can tell us it's not Art. And it's no good just taking a photograph of 1 highway intersection - we'll need 12, or 15, or a 100 and make them really big. Oh and try and make sure there are no cars or people in them, we need to try and have some kind of critical focus in case someone asks. Or how about getting 24 soup cans and filling them with sand, or maybe we'll fill one with sea shells, and, no, lets turn all the ones with sand upside down so we have a lot of little soup-castles, Campbells soup, mind you and, or maybe we could get a box and fill it with.. i don't know... hard boiled eggs and toothbrushes or something or maybe you could just empty the contents of your fridge into a plastic bag and hang it from the ceiling, whatever, anything'll do. We'll let a few critics and pundits in on it and they'll tell us why it's art and all the rich people'll want to buy it.
Dismissing Duchamp and all that follows (and I'm not quite saying that you are) misses out on a fundamental truth locked in to the social nature of the human condition. We care what other people think of us, and how we look to others. We are a herd, and we act like that time and again and it is that communal ego-grooming that provides much of the pleasure to most of the world. Maslow's self actualised state well describes those who break through (or maybe, just Maslow himself).
Just as fashion has its leaders and its followers, so does art and they are closely interlinked. Anyone who wants can join the fun and to serve its function, there have to be inflated prices which occasionally run parallel to the quality but confusing the need for inflated prices with quality - which is what I am suggesting that you are doing - is the start of madness. If not madness, at least grumpyness.
I revel in the idea of Duchamp flogging a urinal, I admire the genius it took and I do forgive all that has come after. Although to be honest if I had to choose between a gift of, say, a single Gerrit Douw or all of Duchamp's ouvre, I know which I'd choose.
Our tastes and appreciation do not exist in a vacuum, and I suspect that in broad terms our independent views of good and bad art are quite similar, but I revel in the nonsense and frippery that makes the fertile soup of art in which we swim. You see, it's not a con. When someone buys a can of artists sh*t or Tracey Emin's bed, they are getting value for their money. Maybe not Art, but value. They are owning something that others want to have and makes them something they want to be. You just can't buy that anywhere else. Be happy for them. And form your own opinion.
My rant was not against artists, but against the fiscalisation of art which is determining the dreary and one dimensional path of things today (IMHO). The blame for that I lay at the door of the art entreprenuers - conceptual art is the easy way for them to ply their trade. And I also fear that like your herd instinct, artists with something valuable and different and original to say tend to migrate towards trends that "seem to work". Artists will always follow the market of course (most) ever since Giotto and before.