What the Art Market Does to Art

The following is a paragraph taken from my earlier post, "Toward a Better Definition of Art:"

This is the key transposition that I think has confounded even the best of us: the feeling of conferred importance has become, through bombardment of countless iterations of the Marcel Duchamp experiment, the experience that people understand as the feeling of art. Museums, galleries, and artists have begun producing objects and events that are designed to refer to other similar objects and experiences within the contemporary art canon, with the goal that they will appear to be influential among their peers, and therefore relevant and important. They call what they are doing “making art,” because it sounds silly to admit what they are really trying to do, which is to bypass art and make something that is simply “important”. But one cannot make an object that is artistically important before it is art, and then call it art because it sounds better. It would be like trying to make “delicious” ice cream before making ice cream, or filling the bestseller shelf in a bookstore with dictionaries.