From The Mona Lisa Curse which aired last night on TVO.

[9m:04s] The death of Bob Rauchenberg to me is not just the loss of a friend, it suggests the death of something that I love about art. So much about what I loved about Rauchenberg’s work was that every formal choice he made came from meeting the world head on. Most of his work like all good art is dense with meaning. It’s not some vacuous exercise in picture making meant to sustain the boys at Sotheby’s or Christie’s with a big price. It’s entirely born of experience, it isn’t born of the market. Some think that so much of today’s art mirrors, and thus criticizes decadence. Not so. It’s just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function. It is part of the problem. The art world dutifully copies our money driven celebrity obsessed entertainment culture. The same fixation on fame. The same obedience to mass media, jostles for our attention through it’s noise and wow and flutter.

Art should make us feel more clearly and more intelligently. It should give us coherent sensations which otherwise we would not have had. That is what brought me to this city [New York]. That is what market culture is killing.

For me, the cultural artefact of the last 50 years has been the domination of the art market. Far more striking than any individual painting or sculpture. It has changed art’s relationship to the world and is drowning its sense of purpose. The flood that threatened to destroy a rich history of art in Florence in the Sixties has its parellel in today’s art world. From the Sixties on the belief in art as a way of making money began as trickle, turned into a stream and finally became a great, brown, roaring flood.

And what resurfaces after this deluge? Art like this, stripped of everything but its market value.

THIS:

[13m:37s] If art can’t tell us about the world we live in then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it.

And that is something we are going to have to face more and more as the years go on; that nasty question that never used to be asked because the assumption was always that it was answered long ago: what good is art? What use is art? What does it do? Is what it does actually worth doing? And an art which is completly moneterized in the way that it’s getting these days is going to have to answer these questions or its going to die.