I recommend this piece by Aaron Haspel. Anyone who supposes that as found art was some kind of eighties Brit art revelation will learn a lot.

Final two paragraphs:

Warhol famously made movies, indescribably dull movies, like the 12-hour shot of the Empire State Building whose only action is a bird flying by every half hour or so. He was often asked why he gave up painting for movies. "Because it's easier," he would say. He once advertised in The Village Voice that he would endorse anything for money. The beauty of these jokes is that they were literally true.

No jokes, however, are funny after the first couple times you've heard them, and these days it is hard to raise more than a yawn when you hear that the Tate Gallery has bought tin cans of some poor lunatic's excrement. Nonetheless, we should remember that it was funny once. Duchamp and Warhol have an indelible place in history, though it may not be in art history — possibly the history of humor, or public relations.

Quite right. When we speak of modern art we are definitely speaking about art, but not of the usual kind. Being a successful con artists is, after all, not easy.

There was recently a BBC4 TV documentary about those here's-my-unmade-bed here's-a-dead-cow-sliced-down-the-middle school of Brit art, and I was struck by that same air of delighted amazement, this time expressed by cockney wide boys, that the scheme was working so well and has such legs.

You can't understand modern art without including the modern media in the story. No newspapers and magazines to puff, discuss, denounce, and there's very little left of it. Ancient art was the media. Modern art is a mere succession of media events, whose media frisson is caused by their very outrageousness and vacuity.

Above all, there must be photography. Even as you curse this nonsense, you want to know what the damn stuff looks like. Would the telegraph have bothered with those tins of crap if there'd be no photograph of them? Have you seen what those Tate bricks look like? I have. I've got a little postcard of them. They're nothing special, but my curiosity was aroused and has been satisfied.

Someone, loot Tate Modern, this time for real.

(As usual, the blogcrap archiving seems to be shot to hell, so go to MJ's main page and then back to May 15th, if you can. Good news: although this link doesn't take you to MJ's May 15th piece about Baghdad (non) looting, it does instead take you to a great May 11th posting about Salam Pax.)

But no one will. The economic value of this stuff would collapse completely if the society which sustains their "importance" were ever to crumble to the point where such looting was doable. Put it this way, if western civilisation in London and its surrounding areas were to collapse next Thursday afternoon, just after lunch, and you were prowling the ruins looking for a pension fund to replace the one you had, would you give the Emin bed a second glance? Well, I suppose you might, on the off chance that Americans might want it, to help them ponder what on earth had gone wrong with these benighted islands.