In a desacralized world, the sacred persists, tenuously, as the aesthetic. Therefore, the work of sacralizing the world becomes an effort to aestheticize it. Paradoxically, this is why the banal comes to dominate art from Dada onwards. A great deal of what seems like provocation is a test of art’s sacralizing capability, that is to say, a test of art’s ability to aesthetically redeem the least aesthetically promising material. The artists themselves may not understand what they are doing. Vapid claims of transgression may surround and obscure their efforts. But the appropriation of the banal is a last-resort form of aestheticization, a limit case. The readymade snatches the ordinary out of ordinariness and makes it imperceptibly singular. So the readymade becomes, effectively, the closest postmodern analogue of the sacred object.