There is a parallel to this escalation in the art market itself. Today this escalation has caught up every form of art, every style and all, without discrimination, have entered the transaesthetic world of simulation. It was in fact with hyperrealism and pop art that everything began, that everyday life was raised to the ironic power of photographic realism. And once freed from reality, we can produce the 'realer than real' - hyperrealism. Once freed from the 'true' Mondrian, we are at liberty to 'out-Mondrian Mondrian' freed from the true naifs, we can paint in a way that is 'more naif than naif', and so on. Thus painting currently cultivates, if not ugliness exactly - which remains an aesthetic value - then the uglier-than-ugly (the 'bad', the 'worse', kitsch), an ugliness raised to the second power because it is liberated from any relationship with its opposite. For, once liberated from their respective constraints, the beautiful and the ugly, in a sense, multiply: they become more beautiful than beautiful, more ugly than ugly. Beyond this indifference, however, another kind of fascination emerges, a fascination which replaces aesthetic pleasure. “In this sense, therefore, inasmuch as we have access to neither the beautiful nor the ugly, and are incapable of judging, we are condemned to indifference.
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