Michel;
I agree with you to an extent. At one time, pedestrian did not get full wall display in a room in a gallery as those two got.
I guess I'm just getting a bit of ennui over pedestrian art. I feel it is getting too prevalent and still too much hype. The other stuff that is dying out, as you point out, should never had a life to start with. That is another part of the point I am trying to make.
Well, if you look at the absolute bores that were produced during the 17th and the 18th century in painting, it's a miracle no exasperated curator did not just burned them all on a bonfire during a bout of drinking!
As to the in-your-face stuff, should it have been never made? Yes and no. On the one hand, some of it is ridiculous, and the fact that we are forgetting who made what when is perhaps a sign. But on the other hand, this is nothing but the continuity of the 19th century rejection of the merchant class. Gérard de Nerval walked on the street of Paris with a lobster in leash because it would offend the "good sensibilities." Courbet painted "L'origine du monde" not just to make a tautological point, but also to make a scandal, and so did Manet with "Olympia."
"Olympia" is on every calendar in the world nowadays! Many of us have no idea of the furor it created, the disgust it engendered. It was an offence perhaps even worse than all the silly Fluxus performance art of the sixties! Yet it's absolutely banal now, dead in the museum, and sterilized in calendars. We are not shocked by it anymore perhaps because we are post-Manet people. The people painting feces on the canvas were just trying to reproduce the same furor. Up to a certain point they succeeded, but that stuff can only be done once.
So I agree with you against the silly art mostly insofar as it fails to make some kind of point. But I have also seen a fantastic, beautiful, meaningful sculpture made by Marc Quinn using the placenta and umbilical cord of his newborn baby.
The problem with good/bad art is that it is also an ethical decision. We cannot avoid choosing certain works as good, and other ones as bad, and we must do so. But we cannot surmise that somewhere there is a golden standard for quality that is just waiting to be discovered, and that will validate once and for all these choices. We do not have the luxury of outsourcing the responsibility of our aesthetic choices to an external standard, and must bear the price of error.