This is a look at the principles of art history. Working from the thesis that modernity is the culture that invented what art is, the author by means of the pictorial essay offers a cultural critique of the contemporary circumstances that have influenced our notions of what art actually is, how we attempt to value it, how we have come to make a business of it. Like film, photography and other forms of mass culture, the author studies how popular taste influences the aesthetic criteria that determine its worth.