Aesthetic concerns were being dispersed into every crevice of reality and this drew the function of art into question. For Baudrillard, art’s claim of exceptionality was dubious. As Chris Kraus describes it, a ‘double-helix’ was formed between Baudrillard and what gets collectively termed as the ‘art world.’ The forceful embrace of Baudrillard’s theories and philosophy by artists and critics was something he remained wary of. As form.īeyond the qualities of the photographs, there are the attendant questions surrounding Baudrillard’s relations with contemporary art. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism.

Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. 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… And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Baudrillard chose photography not for its erroneous claim that it reproduces what one sees in the world, but precisely because to him, photographs looked like ‘nothing on earth’ ( Impossible Exchange, 2001). The ‘gossamer thin difference between illusion and the real’ ( Cool Memories III: Fragments, 1997) articulates itself in these works through the diaphanous, illusory layers that stack upon each other. Scrims, veils, warped reflections and defective facades recur in these photographs as it is in these moments that reality, the major subject of Baudrillard’s discrimination, appears most conjectural.Įach photograph is a record of an apparent absence: an absence of subject, an absence of meaning. Titled only for the city or town where the photograph was shot, they appear as fugitive confrontations between the lens and the surface of things.

Jean Baudrillard captured, and often exhibited, these photographs during his lifetime. The gallery has the pleasure of working with Marine Baudrillard to realize Jean Baudrillard’s photography: Ultimate Paradox and to contemplate these photographs in relation to Jean Baudrillard’s life’s work. –Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005Ĭhâteau Shatto announces an exhibition Jean Baudrillard’s photographic works with great joy. Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?

Jean baudrillard impossible exchange