The Free World by Louis Menand

“Of course, Warhol didn’t kill the avant-garde. He was only making a move in the endless game that is literary and artistic modernism, which is the game of trying to find out what art would look like if we had no illusions about it, what art would be if all the conventional markers of the artwork were exposed and stripped away, if art were reduced to its purely transactional status as a product for sale or an asset for investment, if the artist was revealed to be what artists really are, business people. In 1919, Max Weber described modern life as the Entzauberung der Welt—the disenchantment of the world. That description does not apply to everything—there is still plenty of magical thinking around—but it does apply to modern art. And what does a completely demystified art object look like? It looks like a work of art. That’s the thing about the disenchantment of the world. It’s so enchanting.”

-Louis Menand, 2021