The progressive antipathy for religiosity shows up in modern art as hatred of “illusionism.” It is a hatred that drives modern art toward abstraction and a fixation on the materiality of the signifier.
But art can never become totally materialist, can never be reduced to objecthood, because if it is, it ceases to have a symbolic function and without symbolic function, it ceases to be distinguishable as art.
So an art that seeks to eradicate all illusionism must eventually eradicate itself. And we get very close to this with the readymade. But not quite, because the readymade, whether considered as art or antiart art, still invokes the symbolic. Duchamp’s urinal is no longer just a urinal once it is “nominated” as art. This nomination bears uncanny resemblance to the consecration of the profane object, which likewise may retain the external appearance of a quite ordinary object (stone, tree, pool, bread, wine, etc.) and yet be imbued with unearthly power. It is only in an art history dissociated from the larger history of human ritual that the invention of the readymade is assigned such disproportionate significance. The readymade is a parody of the consecrated object.
The readymade shares with the “literal” minimalist object the sleight of hand of invoking the metaphysical while pretending to abolish it. So Fried’s rejection of literalism in “Art and Objecthood” was well-founded. The idea that wants to come to the surface in that tortured and verbose essay is that art is art only to the extent that it serves a metaphysical purpose. Art is the transfiguration of matter into symbol. And this and this alone is the reason why art cannot be reduced to a dumb, profane object without ceasing to be art. Fried could not bring himself to state this and in failing to state it he revealed why formalism, which for a period served as a bulwark against the banalization of art, finally failed at its task and left the field to be trampled by the postmodernist hordes.