Dave Hickey calls the phenomenon you're talking about a piece of art's "social value"[0]. this goes for lots of things though, not just art (modern or otherwise

Dave Hickey calls the phenomenon you're talking about a piece of art's "social value"[0]. this goes for lots of things though, not just art (modern or otherwise) because all things exist in some historical context and so you can read them (accurately or not) as a cultural reaction or as being part of some larger Scene. my take is that one of the things that makes some art particularly effective is its ability to provoke these reactions when placed in new historical contexts. modern art is particularly complicated because something like Duchamp's Fountain or Readymades can become easily reduced to trope or gimmick "<groan>, another toilet-as-art piece." but software is like this too!! "great, another algebraically-typed fp language with poor unicode support and no stdlib." the thing that makes us keep paying attention is the culture that develops around these things and advocates for and argues for the thing's "social value" irrespective of the "social virtue" we may observe as outsiders. [0]: http://nsfmc.tumblr.com/post/1671107720/since-there-is-no-absolute-authority-in-the-art http://nsfmc.tumblr.com/post/1671107720/since-there-is-no-ab...