Art is an abstraction. Despite its objectness and accompanying didacticism, representational, impressionistic, or even in a fierce figurative realism, these are all abstractions subject to further abstraction, and any transaction of which it is part, is then bartered for other abstractions. Clay becomes idea becomes ledger line. Art is the destruction of meaning. The created void consumes value narratives, popularized ontologies, and tales of moral imperative, all undergirded with economic measures. Aesthetic abstraction is mirrored by capital abstraction, a manipulated market, and charitable shell games to ensure financial return.

Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “pure gaze” (to which hook’s ‘oppositional gaze’ is its antithesis) speaks to “the emergence of an autonomous field of artistic production,” which defines its own “norms of both the production and consumption of its products.” This shifting focus from product to process to concept continues in a chain of subsequent abstractions, shirking the needs and concerns of the dominated class.

Art theory, in its supporting role, provides a theoretical framework for this process. It licenses a cycle that folds back into objects and actions as ready-made. Not urinals or bicycle wheels, but rather self-defining intrinsic valuation designations as the action and production of any artist regardless of the produced object or act. The object and act of art are imbued with an immediate cultural capital and moral resplendency due to their detachment from necessity. The continual reference, even if in negation to the history of art, positions art outside and separate from any reality, allowing it to escape the judgment or critique of adjacent fields and immediate contextual implications.

This detachment creates an escape for both the artist and the viewer. It offers a false solution to the dual longings for cultural capital and liberation from class struggle, purportedly through its ability to provide a form of aesthetic transcendence. Taste is disinterest realized through the symbolic display of capital in the investment of objects that serve no utilitarian need other than as a marker of class. Art is the destruction of wealth.