“Roughly speaking, you have three big trends. The first, and most important one, the one that gets eighty percent of the subsidies, whose pieces go for the most money, is gore in general: amputations, cannibalism, enucleation, etc. All the collaboration work done with serial killers, for example. The second is the one that uses humor: there’s irony directed at the art market, à la Ben; or at finer things, à la Broodthaers, where it’s all about provoking uneasiness and shame in the spectator, the artist, or in both, by presenting a pitiful, mediocre spectacle that leaves you constantly doubting whether it has the slightest artistic value; then there’s all the work on kitsch, which draws you in, which you come close to, and can empathize with, on the condition that you signal by means of a meta-narration that you’re not fooled by it. Finally, there is a third trend, this is the virtual: it’s usually young artists, influenced by manga and by heroic fantasies; many of them start like that, then fall back to the first trend once they realize they can’t make their living on the Internet...There is a famous phrase that divides artists into two categories: revolutionaries and decorators…The revolutionaries are those who are capable of coming to terms with the brutality of the world, and of responding to it with increased brutality…Before Duchamp, the artist had as his ultimate goal a worldview that was at once personal and accurate, that is to say moving; it was already a huge ambition. Since Duchamp, the artist no longer contents himself with putting forward a worldview, he seeks to create his own world; he is very precisely the rival of God."
— Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island
