Consecrate for Change

A lot of you that check in here are artists or art enthusiasts or aesthetes or at least ex-athletes… so I thought I would post a few paragraphs from a book by Jean Baudrillard that I’ve been reading called The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, from the chapter “Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself.” It might be interesting to re-read the “Hipster” article I posted a few weeks ago after reading what Baudrillard has to say. Leave comments about what you think…

“The adventure of modern art is over. Contemporary art is contemporary only with itself. It no longer knows any trancendence either towards past or future; its only reality is that of its operation in real time and its confusion with that reality.

Nothing now distinguishes it from the technical, promotional, media, digital operation. There is no transcendence, no divergence any more, nothing of another scene: merely a specular play with the contemporary world as it takes place. It is in this that contemporary art is worthless: between it and the world, there is a zero-sum equation.

Quite apart from that shameful complicity in which creators and consumers commune wordlessly in the examination of strange, inexplicable objects that refer only to themselves and to the idea of art, the true conspiracy lies in this complicity that art forges with itself, its collusion with the real, through whcih it becomes complicit in that Integral Reality, of which it is now mrerely the fimage-feedback.

There is no longer any differential of art. There is only the integral calculus of reality. Art is now merely an idea prostituted in its realization….

“The trasference of art, become a usesless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum….

“This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy.

The other isde is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of htetime, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumes the fact that he understands nothigns and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation.

The idea of art has become rareified and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries–the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of hte works….

“No longer any real object in all this: inthe ready-made it is no longer the object that’s there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology.

And, ultimately, the twofold curese of modern and contemporary art is summed up in the ‘ready-made’: the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art….

“Art in its form, signifies nothing. It is merely a sign pointing twoards absence.

But what becomes of this perspective of emptiness and absence in a contemporary universe that is already totally emptied of its meaning and reality?

Art can now only align itself with the general insignificance and indifference. It no longer has any privileged status. It no longer has any other final destination than this gluid universe of communication, the networks and interaction.

Transmitter and receiver merging int he same loop: all transmitters, all receivers. Each subject interacting with itself, doomed to express itself without any longer having time to listen to the other.

The Net and the networks clearly increase this possibility of transmitting for oneself in a closed circuit, everyone going at it with their virtual performances and contributing to the general asphyxia [Like what I’m doing right now on this blog??]….

“Since the nineteenth century, it has been art’s claim that is is useless. It has prided itself on this (which was not the case in classical art, where, in a world that was not yet either real or objective, the quesiton of usefulness did not even arise).

Extending this principle, it is enought to elevate any object to uselessness to turn it into a work of art. This is precisely what the ‘ready-made’ does, when it simply withdraws an object from its function, without changing it in any way, and thereby turns it inot a gallery piece. It is enough to turn the real itself into a useless function to make it an art object, prey to teh devouring aesthetic of banality.

Similarly, old objects, being obsolete and hence useless, automatically acqurie an aesthetic aura. Their being distant from us in time is the equivalent of Duchamp’s artistic act; they too become ‘ready-mades’, nostalgic vestiges resuscitated in our museum universe.

We might extrapolate this aesthetic transfiguration to the whole of material production. As soon as it reaches a threshold where it is no longer exchanged in terms of social wealth, ti becomes something like a giant Surrealist object, in the grip of a devouring aesthetic, and everywhere takes its place in a kind of virtual museum. And so we have the museification, like a ‘ready-made’, of the whole technical environment in the form of industrial wasteland….

“Lastly, what purpose does this useless function serve?

From what, by its very uselessness, does it deliver us?

Like politicians, who deliver us from the wearisome responsibility of power, contemporary art, by its incoherent  artifice, delivers us from the ascendancy of meaning by providing us with the spectacle of non-sense. This explains its proliferation: independently of any aesthetic value, it is assured of prospering by dint of its very insignificance and emptiness. Just as the politician endures in the absence of any representativeness or credibility.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.