maybe this is my answer.

"how do we live without foundations?"

a perceived arbitrary at the heart of the discourse of art belies only an approach to art that takes a personal transcendental sublime encounter and proclaims it as a universally applicable experience that will and should be shared by others--

or, it only belies a hierarchy that relies on a discourse -- not because the discourse itself generates a hierarchy and defines 'better' and 'worse', but because by definition a discourse is defined, bounded, "oppositive, relative, and negative", to apply saussure's semiotics to discourses. the luxury status of art thus relies on this boundary, exclusivity. everything is exclusive -- even kitsch is exclusive. what matters here is a) the minority (and thus elite) status of the exclusivity of a certain discourse (high art) and b) the cherished, valued status of this exclusively defined minority discourse.

if people have thought in these threads, I need to know who they are.