1.09.2006

Baudrillard on the "art scene"

OK, it is French theory, but there's something interesting in this bit from Baudrillard:
Disneyland is not, of course, the sanctuary of the imagination, but Disneyland as hyperreal world masks the fact that all America is hyperreal, all America is Disneyland,” he said. “And the same for art. The art scene is but a scene, or obscene”—he paused for chuckles from the audience—“mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized. We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, an aesthetic value, and so we come from art to aesthetics—it’s something very, very different. And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism. And this is the very end of art. As form.”

1 comment:

Lance said...

As a painter and young thinker, I've never been able to come up with a decent argument against Baudrillard. In fact I think that his theories of Trans-aesthetics and trans-everything else for that matter are pretty cool. But I suppose my question is, why does it matter? So what if it's all hyper-real. Hyper-reality is reality if you've never known any different. How can one be considered more or less important or true?

And even if art is in fact an illusion of itself, how does that make it any less critical to our culture. It seems to me that in Baudrillards model art is a perfect reflection of the hyper-trans-culture from which it was born. That, though depressing, is what art has always been. A mirror that reflects simotaniously it's reality (or in this case lack of reality).