Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 On Non-Postmodernity
- 2 Mass Media Culture
- 3 The Linguistic Imaginary
- 4 The Ecliptic of Sex
- 5 The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
- 6 Please Follow Me
- 7 The Evil Demon of Images
- 8 The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?
- 9 Pataphysics of the Year 2000
- 10 Impossible Exchange
- 11 The Millennium, or the Suspense of the Year 2000
- 12 Truth or Radicality? The Future of Architecture
- 13 The Art Conspiracy
- 14 Requiem for the Twin Towers
- 15 Pornography of War
- 16 Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself
- 17 The Pyres of Autumn
- 18 We Have Never Been Postmodern: Reading Jean Baudrillard
- Index
13 - The Art Conspiracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 On Non-Postmodernity
- 2 Mass Media Culture
- 3 The Linguistic Imaginary
- 4 The Ecliptic of Sex
- 5 The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
- 6 Please Follow Me
- 7 The Evil Demon of Images
- 8 The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?
- 9 Pataphysics of the Year 2000
- 10 Impossible Exchange
- 11 The Millennium, or the Suspense of the Year 2000
- 12 Truth or Radicality? The Future of Architecture
- 13 The Art Conspiracy
- 14 Requiem for the Twin Towers
- 15 Pornography of War
- 16 Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself
- 17 The Pyres of Autumn
- 18 We Have Never Been Postmodern: Reading Jean Baudrillard
- Index
Summary
In 2000 Editions Galilée published a collection of Baudrillard's ‘journalistic’ articles in the Paris-based radical newspaper Libération, written between June 1987 and May 1997. The title was Ecran Total. Verso published an English translation by Chris Turner in 2002 as Screened Out. Topics for Baudrillard's dissection included La Cicciolina, President Jacques Chirac, Formula One motor racing, Walt Disney, AIDS, the Holocaust, the West and Bosnia, genetic cloning, mad cow disease, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Silvio Berlusconi and Salman Rushdie, all of which had constituted current ‘events’ in contemporary culture sometime in the decade between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. The extract here is entitled ‘The Art Conspiracy’, originally an article first published in Libération on 20 May 1996, which had spawned much debate and controversy. It effectively marked the end of Baudrillard's honeymoon with the US art world which had extended from the early 1980s until the mid 1990s. Sylvère Lotringer of Semiotext(e) republished the article in book form in America, with a different English translation, as ‘The Conspiracy of Art’ in 2005, collected alongside diverse interviews with Baudrillard and rare writings on art, including his first text - a fragment of a few hundred words dating from 1952 when Baudrillard was only twenty-three years old which runs for only four pages and finds the young Jean ‘rapping’ on pataphysics, Antonin Artaud and Albert Jarry. In ‘The Art Conspiracy’ Baudrillard was taken by the ‘shocked’ critics as saying that art is dead.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Jean Baudrillard Reader , pp. 186 - 191Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008