[WS:] Yeah, yeah, yeah. This whole think started as a protest movement against bourgeois/commercial trading in work of art by subverting the assumptions underlying this trade (value stored in object.) - hence Duchamp placing toilet bowls and bicycle wheels in art galleries. It was a good joke - but just about it. Needless to say that the hordes of bourgeois snobs fell for it and started 'aesthetically appreciating' toilets bowls, bicycle wheels and similar "found art" placed in galleries even though they were told time and again that this was "artistic act" - which they did not and could not observe - that mattered. But after 100 or so years, pulling the same joke is plain boring even though snobs keep falling for it. But let's face it, the merits of this kind of art are on a par with those of the Emperor's clothes.
I tend to agree with Carrol that much what passes for "good art" is in fact a sort of "club good" - its value resides in the fact that it is restricted to a select few and all others are barred from receiving it. Hence the gallery as an enclosed space that poses a physical barrier that keep some of the riff raff out, and the pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo necessary for "proper" understanding that further filters out those who do have the resources and desire to frequent galleries.
However, I do not share his nihilism on the subject. The fact that some practices that pass for art are thinly disguised form of high-brow snobbery that outside their "exclusivenes" have little if any merits does not mean that all art art has no merits or it does not exist as a separate "subject." Art is like language - it exists because humans have the innate capacity to create it as a more or less ordered system, which means rules that define which expressions are and which are not a part of that system, as well as which are possible elements of that system but are not acceptable ones. The sets of rules that distinguish one language (or art form) from another are obviously socially constructed and particular to a given social group - but the capacity to generate and interpret language or art is universal - every human has that capacity. Far from being figments of academic imagination, as Carrol seems to imply, these are the essential attributes of "human nature."
So it is one thing to deride bourgeois art by bringing ostensibly "non-bourgeois-artistic" objects into the sanctuaries of bourgeois art - which can be funny if not repeated and parroted ad nausea. But it is a very different thing to advance a philistine notion that anything that someone who calls himself "artist" do is in fact art, or that anything that anyone do can in fact be art. Those notions are philistine, because they call for the rejection of any rules except those proposed by the individual making those claims. As such, they are epitome of neo-liberal individualism of the I can do as I please and fuck everyone else variety.
Wojtek