Why don't you just try making art?

The current The New Yorker has a profile of Jeffrey Deitch by Calvin Tompkins. In it Deitch repeatedly says how much he loves the artist as art, meaning (I take it) the artist as an anarchistic holy fool whose life is inseparable from the work created. This kind of art brings to my mind the story about the making of Marathon Man:

Hoffman came to the set one day looking absolutely wretched, and Sir Larry said, 'Dusty, you look absolutely wretched!', and it turns out that he had been awake for twenty-four hours, because at this point in the movie, his character had been, so Larry replied, 'Oh, Dusty, why don't you just try acting?

The article described the Dan Colen/Dash Snow 'Hamster Nest" installation at Deitch Projects (where they filled the space waist-deep with shredded paper and spent a few drugged filled, naked nights partying with friends) as well as a dinner performance Deitch arranged (where the naked Austrian art collective Gelitin wore fetish accouterments and built a bridge over the dinner table so that they could piss on the dinner guests). On these sorts of activities, Tomkins remarks:

Whether this sort of thing represents their defiant rejection of the superheated art market and late-capitalist decadence, as Deitch and others suggest, is an open question. My own sense of it is that the self-indulgence level of these activities keep them at sort of pre-adolescent, or even toddler, stage, where the defiant aspects fail to register.

The problem with this kind of nihilistic art is that it is easy. I'm sure there have been times when flouting society's conventions was a brave or shocking statement (the Dadaists had some bite). But now it is a warmed-over formula. These spectacles don't elicit so much a *gasp* as a *sigh*. How about trying for profound instead of profane?