Reddit reviews Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd Edition

Yes. Apologies for any unclarity or confusion! Any obfuscation isn't pretension or intending perplexity. I'll attempt to state more clearly what I mean.

Necessarily there is a preamble to clarify points in that passage you highlighted.

Art in areas where it intersects with academic contexts and readings has become very complex, folding in and out of art theory and philosophy in terms of how it is understood and ideas that shape and influence its manifestations, forms, media, expression. Many galleries, museums and art markets have an awareness of, and operate in relationship to this complex field of criticism and philosophical understanding.

To speak to it (when speaking about something it is also a case of speaking 'to' it), is perhaps akin to regions of science where the mathematics and theory defines the nomenclature whereby the terrain is discussed. This book addresses through a series of essays some of the conceptual premises used to navigate this terrain.

Basically, art historically used to operate very differently, have a different function and serve different interests, meaning and value. In antiquity and before the rise of modernity, art generally, broadly, served a religious and spiritual function. This is no longer the case, and there is no consensus as to what art is or what it serves. Ideas are 'currency', anything goes, and, ultimately art is valued and objectified by and through its market status; the spiritual value and function of art is converted into a monetary value, and that monetary value or sign is the common 'language' or marker of exchange meaning. This is where art operates now in the realm of "prostitution" as you highlighted in your OP. This isn't for all art nor does this determine peoples personal, interior responses to it (although, in these dimensions, it can influence response). But it is a 'net' or matrix that determines a common vocabulary and location of value linked to meaning, and it is dominant in an insidious and forceful manner, all other values and signs of meaning are conclusively reduced to this value.

The terms used in the passage you highlighted from my reply are largely designating states of change and transformation, from one condition into another, requisites of both the meaning of an art work, 'object', and how it is located in a wider social system of exchange, reproduction (including digital forms) and value:

transliteration (a literary term borrowed and used here in terms of an art context),

[reification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(Marxism)

commodification

[recuperation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)

[spectacle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectacle_(critical_theory)

Modernity

apotheosis

[sublime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)

Some of the ideas I think through in relation to art and its meaning in my reply have been drawn against a backdrop of perspective explicated in this book. (To be clear, though it is a useful framework for navigating sociocultural existence now, its objects, productions, operations, machinations, I don't necessarily agree with nor endorse all of the ideas contained therein).

Baha'i challenges much of this and proposes something radically divergent, almost incommensurable with present conditions, akin to a reversal or inversion, reintroducing the spiritual and religious dimension, status and function in relation to art (or the arts in general), ie., the designation of work as worship, and the creation of a painting (which can be extrapolated to all acts of creativity in general) as if one is in the temple, the value placed on creativity and so on relatedly. These designations reinstate a nobility of purpose and aim for art and undoes much of what is the concern of the maze and subject matter discussed above.

I'll return to a couple of points for further explication in the highlighted passage in another reply shortly..