ramblings: on art and historicity, round 2

In his response to my previous post about art and historicity, John argues that even when someone gets "deceived" by a cheap knock-off, or by a manipulative work of art, even then, he might stand to gain as this may eventually lead to the discovery of the original (so to say) qualities of the material. In less contrived times it might have been so; but not today. Today there is a tremendous pressure to replace the original with the copy, and have the copy serve as a more controllable, more sanitized, less ambiguous, less tempestuous, "better" version of the original. Furthermore this effort is neither incidental nor exceptional. It has taken the form of a grand plan to replace art with its industrialized replica: easier to create, more malleable, more consistently monetizable. The scope of this plan is so large that younger generations are already beginning to think of art as something that occurs within a certain distorted social framework, within externally imposed political and economic rules. Take for instance television shows ("reality games" or whatever they are called), so very popular in our country---and elsewhere, I'm sure. What else could their purpose be seen-as but an attempt to document, evangelize, and glorify the project of the systematic elimination of the artist from the creative process. How many children and teenagers take for granted that art is produced within environments, following processes, and governed by dynamics like the ones presented in these carefully constructed allusions of reality. See how the line blurs, year after year, between such game-universes and real life. It is becoming progressively impossible to tell apart the genuine from the fake without looking backwards. Maybe not today, but within a few years the products of similar simulation processes will be sophisticated enough as to be indistinguishable (in terms of form) from the products of the genuine artistic process. In such a cultural environment the "innocence" that John seems to seek, can be very dangerous. The music of Madredeus may indeed "come from the heart", as he claims, but I argue that it will progressively be more difficult to tell if something really comes from the heart, or if it is manufactured to sound like as if it does. And not only this: I claim that today it is, in some cases, already impossible to tell the difference by examining the attributes of form only, without placing the work in a larger framework: Who is the artist, where did he live, how did he grow up, what cultural or artistic influences he had, under what conditions was the work produced, by what means, under whose influence, guidance, or direction, and so on.

These concern have, of course, been set in a much more general context, and have been expressed much more concisely than I could ever hope to do myself:

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of the truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials-worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself---such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

-- Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra" </blockquote