Fun with Marc Rich's son in law, at Art Market Monitor  [all comments stripped at a later date]

Repackaging theater as salable art. Selling nudity as Un-Clothing™
Or perhaps it's like the the actor/peasants in the little village on the grounds of Versailles where Marie Antoinette used to milk cows and goats. Someone should to re-stage that in Chelsea, but Sophia Coppola and Sony already did a much better job of it than Ugo Rondinone and Barbara Gladstone could.

"Over the course of the past 100 years or so, various artists, with varying degrees of success, have attempted to distance themselves from the physical nature of art"

You don't mean artists and art you mean fine artists and fine art. This even though painters used to be called painters and sculptors sculptors. But "artist" now carries a sort of false universalism and a superiority based only on title. Actors and dancers are still actors and dancers, Rauschenberg is no more important than Balanchine, and everything Proust ever wrote was published in an unlimited edition.

"there is something to be said for a pretty picture."
Not much. Boucher's are interesting because it's so hard to see how they could be anything more, yet somehow they are. And Fragonard was a cold bastard.

Art has never been about art. That you buy and sell Porches like you buy and sell art, and I'm referring to the manner not the act, shows how far fine art has fallen in importance. Private material culture is no longer capable of profundity in the way it once was any more than our new oligarchs are kings. Kings stood for kingdoms and were disposible if they got in the way or out of line. Oligarchs are the petty bourgeois with ready cash.
Good luck with Vito. You'll need it.

I almost added another parallel but it would have been lost: the relationship of the newly minted field of "experimental philosophy" to experimental psychology.

From the past: "Audio sculpture" and "The Knobe Effect".
When your lands are no longer fertile you claim someone else's as your own, or, when your tastes don't fit your imperative, you describe your imperative to fit your tastes. See: "Bill Clinton" "Liberal".

I like Schachter's piece, and I appreciate that they let it through the filter; it was in limbo for an hour.
But I was too cruel to Acconci.

See also, recently,  Luxembourg and Dayan