Description

In The Conspiracy of Art, Jean 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.
Born in Reims in 1929 to a family of French peasants, French theorist Jean Baudrillard has challenged all existing theories and visions of contemporary society with radical humor and great precision. An outsider within the French intellectual establishment, Baudrillard is internationally renowned as a 21st century visionary, reporter and provacateur.