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!