The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, EssaysCutting-edge theorist Jean Baudrillard on the complicitous dance of art, politics, economics, and media; includes "War Porn," on Abu Ghraib as a new genre of reality TV. The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war. In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole. Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillard's writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with "War Porn," a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought. |
From inside the book
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... there's more of a king of passage beyond , beyond an interminable history . Hate is more the violent reaction to the fact that there's no solution , that there's no possible resolution to all the problems posed by history . It's a rejec ...
... There's no choice . It's necessary to work with these things . Modern politics begins with the will to dialecticize , to equili- brate forces , to find strategies of compromise between things , which are always thought to be negotiable ...
... there's none that could be expressed in its totality . There's no mirror in which the reflection of the world could be caught . And it goes the same way for the individual : there's no mirror in which his soul could be perceived , only ...
Contents
Introduction | 9 |
The Conspiracy of Art | 25 |
In the Kingdom of the Blind | 36 |
Copyright | |
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