“ ‘The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography and contemporary art has lost the desire of illusion,’ ” he began. “ ‘After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images erasing all its secrets and ambiguity.’ ”

After he read, Baudrillard expanded on his theme. “We say that Disneyland is not, of course, the sanctuary of the imagination, but Disneyland as hyperreal world masks the fact that all America is hyperreal, all America is Disneyland,” he said. “And the same for art. The art scene is but a scene, or obscene”—he paused for chuckles from the audience—“mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized. We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, an aesthetic value, and so we come from art to aesthetics—it’s something very, very different. And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism. And this is the very end of art. As form.”

MIT Press

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.

ARTFORUM

As this self-described "pessimist" spoke, I thought of über-modernist Michael Fried, who wrote "Art and Objecthood" in 1967 to defend art (that is, modernist art, à la Greenberg) against "objects"—the mere stuff invading the art world at the time (in the form of Minimalism, installation, performance, etc.). Art isn't stuff, Fried argued; it's not just a bunch of objects that interact with the viewer. At the cusp of postmodernism, Fried saw what was happening but was famously wrong about the future of art. Weirdly enough, Baudrillard has arrived at a similar place almost forty years later. Like Fried, who defended art's autonomy, Baudrillard kvetched that art is "infected with the hyperreality that aestheticizes everything" and deprived of its specialness. He called for an art lifted and separated from "value," from obscene "proximity" to the viewer, from the interactivity where "you (the viewer) are the artist.

"Art is inexchangeable," Lotringer chimed in helpfully. "It cannot be reduced to value . . . we need a New Deal where things will not be exchangeable."

I was glad to get a reality check afterward. New York Times writer Deborah Solomon marveled at how "all those guys, Fried, Arthur Danto, Hilton Kramer, start to sound alike about the 'end of Art.'" Don't these people have the hindsight to consider that maybe it's their point of view that's history, and that art will be just fine? "It's all over for them in the '60s," she said. "They can't see anything after Brice Marden."

How uncanny that Baudrillard's discourse lubricated big-ticket sales for art that made infinite jest about its own inflated "value" all the way to the bank. He was (mis)taken as the cheerleader for simulacra. His discourse was used to endorse the confusion between art and commodity by branding high-end product with fancy schmancy postmodern theory. His call now for art to subvert "the banality of hyperreality" puzzled the room that evening, but he's always been a Situationist—very anti-"society of the spectacle"—an intellectual black hole aspiring to implode the system from within. They would have known that if they had actually read him. But few people did. His discourse was a fetish; "Baudrillard," a brand name. That's what people came to see tonight, and that's what they got. Most couldn't follow what the heck he was saying—and not for lack of trying. Some blamed themselves for it. Hes the antifetish fetish, but his brand identity is "difficult," so . . . whatever!