Masterpieces and Metapictures
ARHT Masterpieces and Metapictures EssayIn Jean Baudrillard's publication, "Absolute Merchandise", Baudrillard explores French poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire's, ideas on the modern art, supporting these with Andy Warhol's Pop Art. By doing so, Baudrillard discusses the essence of modern art and addresses the orthodox notion that art is rapidly being corrupted and degraded by "a commercial, vulgar, capitalist, advertising society" (Baudrillard, 1988, pp. 18). Through Baudelaire, Baudrillard implies that this is not necessarily the case, the traditional art concept being outdated within the context of modern society. In fact, he suggests, the salvation of art is embedded within the alienation of the aesthetic values traditional artwork concepts were founded on. Baudrillard refers to this as the "relentless pursue (of) the indifference and equivalence of mercantile value" (Baudrillard, 1988, pp.18), which, in effect, transforms the artwork into what he calls "absolute merchandise" (Baudrillard, 1988, pp.18). Baudrillard begins this article by indicating that art is "caught up in the process of its own disappearance" (Baudrillard, 1988, pp.18). To Baudrillard, much of modern art is based on disappearance, in particul
Circulation becomes all, the artificiality and superficiality of exchange value being accentuated, claiming to alienate the object, which, ironically, defeats the logic of alienation because, as mentioned, the "absolute merchandise", in its purity, has no value, arguing that alienation thus cannot occur in the first place. The modern strife for perfection, as was Warhol's goal, is therefore contested as being both attainable and unattainable, simply because perfection, and "nothing", cannot logically be understood in isolation. Baudrillard continues to hail Baudelaire's ideas by comparing them with Walter Benjamin's, which, he claims, implies that the "art object loses its aura and its authenticity in the age of reproduction" (Baudrillard, 1988, pp. 18) which is "more mercantile than merchandise itself" through its extreme exaggeration of the formal and fetishistic abstraction of merchandise. Baudrillard applies these concepts to Andy Warhol, one of modern art's most influential and revolutionary artist. ar, the disappearance of meaning; as the acknowledgement of the "nothing" is essential for the virtue of modern art. Ironically, it is this disappearance, or emptiness of the modern art object that defines modern art. The fact that Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans was a sensation in the 1960s is backbone to Baudrillard's argument, indicating that reproduction, in the form of simulation, did not degrade the art object, but in fact elevated it by making the merchandise object or sign sacred through Warhol's signature method of transparency. Where even the notion of defining something relies on the fact that that which defines it is something to begin with. Baudrillard even credits Baudelaire for identifying art with fashion. 20)Warhol having pioneered and perfected the art of disappearance within art and the art object, has, in effect, transcended art itself, emerging as its hero, the "disalienated artist" (Baudrillard, translated 2001), by achieving "perfection" through "radical fetishism". The modern hero is no longer the hero of the artistic sublime: he is the hero of the objective irony of the merchandise world, as embodied by art in the objective irony of its own disappearance" (Baudrillard, 1988, pp.
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