The Disappearance of Art – Jean Baudrillard
The reflection on essays continues; today is dedicated to reading the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. The chosen text is The Disappearance of Art, published in 2012 by Abscondita in the Miniature series. Number 92 is edited by Elio Grazioli, who clarifies in the afterword the origin of the texts included in the small volume. In fact, the book is divided into two distinct but related parts.
Published in the late 1980s, the essays were presented during conferences held in museums and cultural venues in the United States.
What to do after the orgy?
To say that this is the question that struck me the most would be an understatement. I had never really asked myself such a thing—not only because I have never ventured into those kinds of activities, but also because such boldness, although it may belong to me verbally, leaves me indifferent in other contexts full of excesses and complications.
Placed within a cultural perspective, however, the question is quite effective: it conveys the idea well and clarifies Baudrillard’s interpretative key through another question, which—stripped of its previous meaning—becomes simpler and clearer: what will be the destiny of art?
His theory arises from reflections made more than a century ago by Charles Baudelaire and reaches the artistic project of Andy Warhol. Art must become like a commodity; it must assume all the characteristics associated with it, multiply its meanings, and expose itself to sale. Its liquidity serves to overcome its immobility linked to a value whose uniqueness lies in profit.
Art, therefore, must become a kind of destructive machine capable of grinding everything around it, making itself monstrously splendid in comparison with the commodity.
We are not far from the fetishistic vision of Jean Clair, but we go even further: art, at a certain point, surpasses its destructive state and reaches disappearance—its vanishing point, the “xerox degree” of culture.
A precise reference helps illustrate this idea.
During and after the Cold War, new devices appeared on the global market that Marshall McLuhan called “cool media,” whose highest expression culminated in television. This device softened the perception of historical events that were changing the fate of the world. Through this medium, everything becomes hyper-realized, satellized, suspended and immobile, creating a kind of symbolic equilibrium made today largely of terror.
What this means is that everything cancels everything else (“imagination has died from an overdose of images”). Even though there were periods in which artistic events acquired great experimental value—such as those involving Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian—from that moment onward what happens is an overwhelming exaggeration of meaning that eventually annihilates itself, becoming an anxious or wild gesture, as in the case of Jackson Pollock.
Today we find ourselves facing a fiction: what happens after the orgy. Modernity—with its exhausting conception of the free circulation of goods, media, people, and capital—has not generated continuity, but rather a chain reaction that amplifies emptiness.
After such massive intrusions, the obvious is simply carried forward while waiting for things to change. We pretend that, once a certain threshold has been crossed, everything can still be considered normal. We continue to imitate within an indefinite and constant temporal condition whose foundation is aesthetics.
Paradoxically, if one moves beyond linguistic conventions, the meanings associated with the term “aesthetic” correspond to uniformity and standardization, not to aesthetics understood as sensitivity and the capacity to feel. Instead, we approach a condition of prosthesis supporting something that is nothing more than illusion: a disappearance that amplifies the production of creativity without arriving anywhere, while simultaneously generating new stages of simulation.
The solution must be sought in a rupture, a living change—not in a process of accumulation to which we have been attached for too long.
What I seem to understand from the scholar’s thought is that the process of accumulating memories produces an effect of removal rather than creativity, leading us—like art itself—to a condition of recycling rather than flourishing.
We are no longer interested in secrecy or seduction but in a process of mummification, in which images become part of an endless cycle.
“When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore, and art itself disappears.”
Media, computers, and video have also contributed to transforming the status of art, making each of us capable of becoming a “master,” allowing anyone to say or do something simply by using a tool—without an adequate foundation capable of truly building effective linguistic and visual innovation.
Art, for its part, has reacted by minimizing itself, by simulating its own disappearance.
“Art is disguised as the idea. The idea is disguised as art… art ‘in drag’ is art crossed by the idea, by the empty signs of art.”
- https://amaliatemperini.com/2013/03/26/la-sparizione-dellarte-jean-baudrillard/
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