[Paleopsych] New Yorker: Baudrillard on Tour

[Premise Checker]

Baudrillard on Tour
The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town
ttp://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051128ta_talk_macfarquhar

[Baudrillard is most definitely not an academic bore.]

    MEN OF LETTERS
    Issue of 2005-11-28
    Posted 2005-11-21

    There may never again be a year in Jean Baudrillard's life quite like
    1999. Baudrillard, the French philosopher, is best known for his
    theory that consumer society forms a kind of code that gives
    individuals the illusion of choice while in fact entrapping them in a
    vast web of simulated reality. In 1999, the movie "The Matrix," which
    was based on this theory, transformed him from a cult figure into an
    extremely famous cult figure. But Baudrillard was ambivalent about the
    film--he declined an invitation to participate in the writing of its
    sequels--and these days he is still going about his usual
    French-philosopher business, scandalizing audiences with the
    grandiloquent sweep of his gnomic pronouncements and his post-Marxian
    pessimism.

    Earlier this month, he gave a reading at the Tilton Gallery, on East
    Seventy-sixth Street, in order to promote "The Conspiracy of Art," his
    new book. The audience was too big for the room--some people had to
    stand. A tall, Nico-esque blond woman in a shiny white raincoat leaned
    against the mantelpiece, next to a tall man with chest-length
    dreadlocks. A middle-aged woman with red-and-purple hair sat nearby.
    There was a brief opening act: Arto Lindsay, the onetime Lounge
    Lizard, whose broad forehead, seventies-style eyeglasses, and sturdy
    teeth seemed precariously supported by his reedy frame, played a
    thunderous cadenza on a pale-blue electric guitar.

    Baudrillard opened his book and began to read in a careful tone. He is
    a small man with large facial features. He wore a brown jacket and a
    blue shirt. (Some years ago, he appeared on the stage of Whiskey
    Pete's, near Las Vegas, wearing a gold lamé suit with mirrored lapels,
    and read a poem, "Motel-Suicide," which he wrote in the
    nineteen-eighties. But there was no trace of the lamé Baudrillard at
    the Tilton Gallery.)

    " `The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography and
    contemporary art has lost the desire of illusion,' " he began. "
    `After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved
    into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images
    erasing all its secrets and ambiguity.' "

    After he read, Baudrillard expanded on his theme. "We say that
    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."

    Sylvère Lotringer, Baudrillard's longtime publisher, who was there to
    interview him, added, "Yes, this is what I was saying when I was
    quoting Roland Barthes saying that in America sex is everywhere except
    in sex, and I was adding that art is everywhere but also in art."

    "Even in art," Baudrillard corrected.

    "Even in art, yes. The privilege of art in itself as art in itself has
    disappeared, so art is not what it thinks it is."

    Many people in the room wished to ask Baudrillard a question. A
    gray-haired man wearing a denim cap and a green work shirt, an acolyte
    of the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, wanted to know whether, even if
    art was no longer art, as such, it might not still function as useful
    therapy for the wounded narcissism of artists. A middle-aged man in
    the second row who had been snapping photographs of Baudrillard with a
    tiny camera raised his hand.

    "I don't know how to ask this question, because it's so multifaceted,"
    he said. "You're Baudrillard, and you were able to fill a room. And
    what I want to know is: when someone dies, we read an obituary--like
    Derrida died last year, and is a great loss for all of us. What would
    you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you? I would
    like to know how old you are, if you're married and if you have kids,
    and since you've spent a great deal of time writing a great many
    books, some of which I could not get through, is there something you
    want to say that can be summed up?"

    "What I am, I don't know," Baudrillard said, with a Gallic twinkle in
    his eye. "I am the simulacrum of myself."

    The audience giggled.

    "And how old are you?" the questioner persisted.

    "Very young."
    COMMENT
    MEN OF LETTERS
    DISPLACEMENT DEPT.
    THE BOARDS
    THE FINANCIAL PAGE
    [spacer.gif]
    -- Larissa MacFarquhar
    BACK TO THE TOP
    DISPLACEMENT DEPT.
    [spacer.gif]

                          [sub_onedollar_title.gif]
                                 [spacer.gif]
                                 [spacer.gif]
                    Click here for INTERNATIONAL ORDERS >>
                         Click here to GIVE A GIFT >>

    E-mail address
    ___________________________________

    State
    [Choose your State...]

    Name
    ___________________________________


    Mailing address 1
    ___________________________________

    Zip
    ______

    Mailing address 2

    ___________________________________

    continue

    City
    ___________________________________


    [spacer.gif]

                  [me_submenu02.gif] [me_submenu03.gif] [me_submenu04.gif]
             [me_submenu_events.gif] [me_submenu05.gif] [me_submenu06.gif]
                                                       [me_submenu07.gif]

    [spacer.gif]
    [fo_condenet.gif]
    Copyright © CondéNet 2005. All rights reserved.
    Use of this Site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and
    Privacy Policy.
    This Site looks and works best when viewed using browsers enabled with
    JavaScript 1.2 and CSS, such as Netscape 7+ and Internet Explorer 6+.

    [spacer.gif]

    [spacer.gif]                          Click here to Subscribe
    [spacer.gif] [cover_newyorker_80.jpg]
    [spacer.gif]
    [spacer.gif]
    [spacer.gif]
    [spacer.gif]
    [spacer.gif]
    [spacer.gif]
    [spacer.gif]
    [spacer.gif]
    [spacer.gif]

    [javascript_disabled]