In The Conspiracy of Art (2005), a collection of Jean Baudrillard’s analyses on the visual arts, he gives the name “strange attractors” to objects which, without any pretense about their aesthetic value or status as “art”, do a better job nonetheless of fulfilling the ideals of art (Baudrillard’s conception of those ideals, anyway). “Why must the sanction for the sublime and the exceptional always come from art?” he asks in reaction to Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s provocative claim that 9/11 was one of the greatest works of performance art in modern times.

For at least two decades prior, perhaps since the 1984 interview “Game with Vestiges”, Baudrillard had been declaring that every possible artistic form and function had been exhausted, so that what we were left with was a game of rehashing and recombination.  In 1994, long after his theories on the Simulacra had been appropriated by the American art scene and he had been hailed as a visual arts guru, he published The Transparency of Evil, in which he extended his exhaustion argument to the claim that since art had infiltrated every sphere of existence, the ideals of the avant-garde had been realized, a state of “transaesthetics” had come to be, and by virtue of these conditions, art itself as something separate had disappeared.

This argument was further sharpened and pointed toward those who populated the field of interests called the art world in the essay The Conspiracy of Art (1996), which famously stands as the culmination of Baudrillard’s betrayal (or simply rejection, depending on how one views it) of the art world.  Here, Baudrillard talks of how “art” as a designation is held up by the collusive efforts of those who stand to profit from it, including the most earnest artists.  Though Baudrillard’s radical critique on art largely got him ostracized from the art world, and though he was not able to recognize the richness and variety of new frontiers contemporary art has produced since the early 1990s (perhaps because the old can never really cope with the new, and because of the perceived frivolity of the Now), the weight of his claims — which nearly sink the boat — are still slowly, reluctantly, existentially being integrated into the mainstream understanding of contemporary art.¹

What I wanted to do in view of this is begin an image series in which works of art — conceptual, performance, installation, political, new media, participatory, research oriented — are paired, contrasted, and appraised against similar objects and events that emerge from unadorned reality as what Baudrillard might have called “strange attractors”.  Each week we will invite someone to contribute a new pair.

Tehching Hsieh - Cage Piece (1978-79(

V.S.

Stefania Follini, who was involved in a 1989 experiment on circadian rhythms, and voluntarily isolated herself in an underground room fifty feet down a cave in Carlsbad, New Mexico, away from all outside indications of night and day, for 166 days.

Maurizio Montalbini, the sociologist who initiated the project with Follini, lasted in isolation for 366 days in 1993, thinking it had only been 219.

1. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/2008_Kellner_Baudrillard%20and%20the%20Art%20Conspiracy.pdf [↩]