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Baudrillard’s rejection of art was all the more unexpected, and appeared all the more outrageous to those who believed he had crossed over. And yet he didn’t seem to notice the contradiction. The episode of the “simulationist school” (and of the “anti-simulationist” controversy) may have had something to do with it. In 1987 Baudrillard didn’t yet know much about the American art world and didn’t quite realize what was happening around his name. At best, he told me later, he sensed that “there was something fishy there” [Je me suis méfié] with a sound peasant-like distrust of sleek city talkers. So he flatly refused to play into the artists’ hands. He might as well have acceded their demand, the way he subsequently accepted the gallerists’ offer to exhibit his photographs because it would eventually have amounted to the same. What could anything one does ever be wrong coming “after the orgy”? If art ceased to matter as art, then what prevented anyone from joining in? Actually that he, who admittedly had no artistic claim or pedigree, would be invited to exhibit his work, amply proved his point: there was nothing special anymore about art. Groucho Marx once said that he would never join a club that accepted him as a member. Baudrillard did worse: he joined a group whose reasons to exist he publicly denied.
“Pataphysician at twenty – situationist at thirty – utopian at forty – transversal at fifty – viral and metaleptic at sixty – the whole of my history,”9 is the way Baudrillard once epitomized his own itinerary. Pataphysics was founded by Alfred Jarry, creator of Ubu, the brat-king with a paunch. It is the science of imaginary solutions, and this is precisely what Baudrillard reinvented in the circumstance. A pataphysical solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Because he certainly had no problem with it. Others may have, but it was their problem and it wasn’t up to him to solve it. Attacking art and becoming an artist all at the same time was perfectly acceptable in his book. He hadn’t asked to show his photographs, merely obliged. As far as he knew, they may have been trying to bribe him publicly, some kind of “sting operation” by the art squad. But they always implicate you in one way or another, so at least it was all above board. It was part of the "conspiracy" of art. Baudrillard didn’t have to feel any qualms about it, could even enjoy the ride for what it was worth. Early on he learned from French anthropologist Marcel Mauss that “gifts” always come with a vengeance. He knew he would eventually have to reciprocate, squaring the circle. And he did: he wrote “The Conspiracy of Art.”