On Jean Baudrillard’s Art Theory

Jean Baudrillard expressed his views on art, including fine art, photography, and poetry, in books and articles published at various stages of his academic career. Ventu-ring the first systematic critical survey of these thoughts, this dissertation argues that Baudrillard’s theoretical discussions of art and artefact generally concern two broad terms, namely "human" and "object." Here "human" alludes to western humanism in the traditional sense, and "object" refers to both "objectality" of things and "otherness" of any kind, for it exists not only in things but also in works of art and even in the "hu-man." By objectifying the human, Baudrillard adopts art as one of his battle fields to forge philosophical and sociological theories of his own, and to anatomize the capitalist society, especially the cultural spectacle of contemporary capitalism predominated and shaped by new media technology.Divided into four chapters, the dissertation addresses four major theories of Baudrillard’s wherein he significantly discusses art, scrutinizing how he analyzes art while elaborating on those theories and how art and works of art play a vital role in his theoretical construction.Chapter one examines Baudrillard’s theorization onthe order of simulacra. He views the history of art as a process of evolving through forms of " reproduction of signs," thereby re-thinking the revolutionary turning points in western art since the age of Re-naissance. Those turning points, in Baudrillard’s theory, signify the transforming rela-tionships between artwork and the real world. In his view, the technology of reproduc-tion is a medium that not only disrupts the boundaries of social space, but also changes the structure of social relations and social power.Chapter two discusses Baudrillard’s concepts oftransaesthetics and fractal mode to interrogate his vision of the "end of art" in our times. According to Baudrillard, the total implosion of contemporary society enables truth and meaning to break the original boundaries of metaphysics, so that all types of social energy overflow and emanate in all directions. Neither can aesthetics escape this contemporary destiny caused by the "hyper-realism" of mass media. Now that art has lost its traditional role as carrier of aesthetic values, Baudrillard declares that contemporary art is nothing but a null.Chapter three explores into Baudrillard’s views on photography and his photographic works. As mirror of his theoretical writing, photography for Baudrillard is to put in practice his own strategies of the object as he advocates in theory. His photo-graphic works break away from the "history of photography"; for he takes pictures of objects and objects alone, purporting that human portraits are full of meanings whereas his own photographic practice means to get rid of meaning to arrive at " radical other-ness."Chapter four employs Baudrillard’s theory of "symbolic exchange" to elucidate his poetics of devalued poetry. His theory of " symbolic exchange" grafts Marcel Mauss’s concept of "gift" and Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of "anagram," with reference to Georges Bataille’s "general economics" on "expenditure." In other words, Baudrillard’s poetics derives from his attempt to test "symbolic exchange" in the act of poetry. His po-etic theory is anti - linguistics, namely a revolt against the political economics of lan-guage that has been constructed simultaneously with discourses of accumulation and sur-plus value in western political economics.