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. Spiralling
from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become
transaesthetic, like the rest of society as a whole.
Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvère
Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents his writings
on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economy and media.
Culminating with “War Porn,” a scathing analysis
of the spectacular images of Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre
of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the
very nature of radical thought.
