>>2992267>Obviously this is a tautology in linguistic terms--but in linguistic terms only...Perhaps this is too gnomic for the uninitiated. let me rephrase in a less self-indulgent way.
Historically (in European bourgeois society) "Art" has been the privileged object of aesthetic theory, theory derived from the continent's (inherently theological) metaphysical tradition. The decisive emergence of aesthetics in the 19th century marked the culmination of a socio-political and economic development beginning as early as the 14th century and characterized by phenomenology and secular humanism; the theoretical formulation of aesthetics was concomitant with actual material changes resulting from the hypostatization of these politicized belief- or value-systems (ideologies). The objects it treated on ("artwork"--paintings, sculptures, and *actual plundered loot*) were thus quite literally the concentrated, fetishized embodiments of wealth--movable/transportable, unique, anthropomorphic (in scale and totalizing conceit), and reserved for the most privileged or elite. (Consider that our present-day museum, first seen in the Louvre, is the bastard offspring of the church/temple and the private galleries of royalty.) In this sense, aesthetic theory was an attempt to differentiate "art" from the rest of the world by defining its intrinsic properties and locating them in the concrete presence of the "artwork" itself (which was otherwise just one object among others). However, this differentiation produced the aforementioned tautology in the form of the frame (and pedestal, proscenium, etc.--things which mark the separation between the artwork and the world where it appears) whose necessary physical co-presence with the artwork had to be disavowed or denigrated for it to be conceptually functional. In so far as the frame conditions our viewing experience of the "artwork" (i.e. structures its aesthetic autonomy), it reproduces the metaphysical fetish on an individual scale.
