IT'S PROGRESS WHEN THEY STOP PRETENDING IT'S ART:

More than 50 years ago, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously declared (in an aphorism often misattributed to Andy Warhol): "Art is anything you can get away with." For nearly the whole history of human creativity, of course, that wasn't true. Talent and skill were required to produce works regarded as art, and artistic greatness required striving for truth or excellence or beauty.

But over the past century, as critics, collectors, and academics genuflected ever more reverently before works that amounted to mere stunts, gimmicks, or provocations, "art" really did come to be anything the artist could get away with. A banana duct-taped to an art gallery's wall made headlines in 2019 when it sold for $120,000. But such antics are now legion in arts circles.

At the Manchester Art Gallery in Great Britain, a wadded-up sheet of paper is displayed in a glass case and identified as "Work No. 88″ by the English artist Martin Creed. The museum has recorded a video in which a staff member explains the significance of displaying something so insignificant. "You might come across this," she says, "and feel frustrated and think: Why is that there? Why is that considered to be art? But that response is also valuable; it's also a creative response that can't happen if this work hadn't been made."

By such logic, what wouldn't qualify as display-worthy art? In recent years, museums have exhibited "art" involving pieces of dung, individuals throwing up, an American flag on the floor to be walked on, a plank of wood painted black and propped against a wall, and a messy unmade bed. As far back as 1917, Marcel Duchamp conceived of submitting a porcelain urinal, titled "Fountain," to a New York exhibition staged by the Society of Independent Artists. To their credit, the society's directors refused to display the item, regarding it as rude. A century later, anything goes -- the ruder (or sillier or dumber or shallower), the better. Art is anything you can get away with.

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