Ah, Art.

"It was Andy Warhol, I think, who, when asked to define art, said that "Art is what you can get away with." Warhol's own career, and, indeed, a large part part of the contemporary art world testify to the power--if not the truth--of that observation. The sad fact is that today, anything can be not only be put forward but also and accepted and celebrated as a work of art. I won't bother to rehearse examples: everyone here knows what I am talking about: Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethore, Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Matthew Barney: the very names conjure up a cultural disaster zone.

The question is: How did did we get here? Well, that is a complicated question to which there is no short answer. But if one had to sum up volumes in a single word, a good candidate would be the word "beauty": What the art world is lacking today is an allegiance to beauty.

--Richard Kimball. Here's the whole thing.