With the growth of the market system, the artist's work comes to be individualized as a unique source of revelatory value. Just as stockbrokers get rich by picking the richest stocks, recognition of esthetic value is itself a value. Even when the modern artist assails the public's bourgeois Philistinism, his attack is implicitly or explicitly addressed to the connoisseur who will appreciate the value of his work. In the secular world of modern art, as the source of significance becomes increasingly personal, my relationship with the artist becomes increasingly complex. Yet the more the artist attacks his audience, the more he expresses his need of it.
Provocation is just another form of love.
Even when he just pours the paint on the canvas, the artist is trying to communicate to us a unique revelation of truth. The spectator, assumed to be already familiar with the paintings, is given little information about them. The museum is a temple of art in which the visitor's communion is presumed to be informed by esthetic competence. In contrast with the traditional museum, the Getty embodies a new, postmodern perspective in which communion is no longer a meaningful concept. Postmodern democracy has in principle put an end to the struggle between artist and spectator.