Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

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Baudrillard, Jean. The conspiracy of art: Manifestos, interviews, essays. Sylvere Lotringer (Ed.), Los Angeles, CA., Distributed for Semiotext(e) by MIT Press, 2005, pages 247, ISBN 1-58435-028-8, paperback 9.95 pounds.

Reviewed by

Christine Boyko-Head

Lesley University

            French theorist, self-proclaimed intellectual terrorist, and cultural provocateur, Jean Baudrillard took the art world by storm in 1983 when his essay Simulations was translated into English. In 1996, the art world stormed back when he declared in The Conspiracy of Art, art and reality to amount to a  sum zero equation (20). Such a statement should have come as no surprise, since Baudrillard’s theorizing focused more and more on the ‘take-over’ of all individuals by mass media, and informational systems such as computerization and cybernetic creations. So powerful and influential were these thoughts, that Baudrillard even made it to the Hollywood screen – certain proof that reality had imploded into an artifice more real than the real itself!

     The Conspiracy of Art, edited by Sylere Lotringer, is a collection of essays, manifestos and interviews intended to realign Baudrillard’s explosive 1996 statements in the discourse of postmodernism.  Lotringer bluntly asserts that most missed Baudrillard’s point. Divided into six sections, Provocation, Controversy, Illusions, Implosions, Reality-shows, and Imaginary solutions, the book becomes a homogenous mass of thoughts, ideas, questions and queries attempting to make readers finally “get the point” regarding Baudrillard’s iconoclastic and scandalous statement. Bouncing back and forth in time, the essays and interviews enter into a dialogic dance that swirl Baudirillard’s comments on art with consumerism, consumerism with politics, politics with art and both art and politics with commercialism, collusion, and conspiracy.

            The introduction by Lotringer is an interesting array of splash phrases and mind exhilarating numbness. It sets the perfect tone for what the reader will encounter with the rest of the book. Gingerly, yet hastily pages are turned to reach the next challenge, the next nullification of meaning, the next ground zero of understanding. While Lotringer never explicitly states the book’s purpose, as one journeys through material written in 2002, 1996,  2003, 1978 etc. it is clear that Lotringer is fabricating in true Matrix style a Baudrillarian answer to the art world’s question: How dare you, Jean? Intentionally positioning interviews and essays in a non-chronological order, Lotringer produces a response, a clarification, a new manifesto based on the Baudrillardian models and codes that precede the text. It is true Baudrillard in its sleep-walking lucidity.

       The Provocation contains just that: the article that started what the art world saw as an attack, an assault, a betrayal,  from one who seemed to be on their side. The assault is continued in the 1997 article, “A conjuration of imbeciles” where Baudrillard equates the “nullity of contemporary art with the political impotence in the face of Le Pen” (30). The next article leaps to 2002 and his examination of “a culture of indifference that is not far from becoming the only true social bond” (36). These three articles position the reader in the thick of the battle. What follows, next, is the editor’s attempt to unpack, disarm, and redistribute Baudrillard’s concepts.

        To do this, Lotringer begins with Baudrillaard’s 1990 article on Andy Warhol where his comments on Warhol art and function can be recoded as autobiographical insight. His gift for dramatization, the abolishing of aesthetics and art, the dissolving of subject and artist from the creative act in order to attain “a zero-level capable of bringing out singularity and style” (45) explains Baudrillard’s own ironic and dramatic flair. Zero-level achieves a fullness by reaching an other side that , like a prism, re-enters the world in brilliance: “nullity, however, is a secret quality that cannot be claimed by just anyone. . . real insignificance. . . is the rare quality of a few exceptional works that never strive for it.” (27). As the editor arranges the articles, it becomes clear that the conspiracy of art was “a metaphor” used to illustrate Baudrillard’s anthropological approach to art as a functional object rather than a privileged subject  – since the Baudrillardian subject and object switch roles only to telemorph into the images and codes “of the banalization of existence” (199).

        Near the end of the book, Lotringer includes Baudrillard’s 2004 essay, War Porn. This powerful piece demonstrates Baudrillard’s extreme yet exquisite perspective as a cultural/political critic. In this article America has a parody of violence, “a grotesque infantile reality-show, in a desperate simulcrum of power” (206). His language and images twist and turn like intellectual pretzels that when consumed explode in the reader’s belly like a “cancerous and imaginary state” (213). In deed the circle has been squared with society progressing forward to a beginning beyond zero.

       In the end, The conspiracy of art by Jean Baudrillard and edited by Sylere Lotringer is a fascinating read for those not satisfied with the artifice of reality shows, nor the reality of Disneyland America. It challenges the reader to see the transparency of the conspiracy and the conspiracy inherent in transparency. The entire book can be summarized by Baudirillard’s own words: “The function of language, its only function really, is not to communicate or inform, transmit something – all this is secondary – but to captivate” (247). Whether the work intends to charm us, or to take us captive, placing  ecstasy and evil in the same experience is pure Jean Baudrillard.