Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) verifies Baudrillard’s message:

That “objective” element which has been reduced to a minimum must, in the case of abstraction, be recognized as the most powerfully affective real element.
Thus, finally, we see that if in the case of great realism the real element appears noticeably large and the abstract noticeably small, and if in the case of great abstraction this relationship ap- pears to be reversed, then in their ultimate basis (=goal) these two poles equal one another. Between these two antipodes can be put an=sign:
Realism=Abstraction
Abstraction=Realism
The greatest external dissimilarity becomes the greatest internal similarity.[11]

In the world of the postmodern mutual annulment of object and subject, “the greatest external dissimilarity becomes the greatest internal similarity.” A specter is haunting the West—the heroic spirit of modernism—even if we keep acting as if it no longer matters. It was depicted as a timelessly screaming, violent, narcissistic, and unending self-contradictory project that is waning away. Now the specter of the waning of affect is haunting us in the world of postmodernism. We are losing our “emotion,” which used to be “projected out and externalized, as a gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling.” As the American literary critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson writes:

Edward Munch’s painting The Scream is, of course, a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an embodiment not merely of the expression of that kind of affect but, even more, as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have vanished away—for both practical and theoretical reasons—in the world of the postmodern. The very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside, of the wordless pain within the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that “emotion” is then projected out and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling.[12]

Anderson praises modernism as a time of “unrepeatable genius”: the collective movements of Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, and Surrealism, with their heroes such as Proust, Eliot, and many others “separated the elective ground of the artist from the terrains vagues beyond.”[13] Jameson’s discussion of van Gogh’s canonical A Pair of Boots (1887) illustrates how the heroic spirit is separated from “the elective ground” in our time. He begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of the work:

“In them,” says Heidegger, “there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.” “This equipment,” he goes on, “belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. . . . Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being,” by way of the mediation of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and earth into revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasant woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the worn and broken instruments of labor in the furrows and at the hearth.[14]

Jameson then compares van Gogh’s shoes with Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980):

Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object. On the level of the content, we have to do with what are now far more clearly fetishes, in both the Freudian and the Marxian senses (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian Paar Bauernschuhe, that the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair, which allows neither for perversion nor for fetishization). Here, however, we have a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dance hall.[15]

We are cool and no longer able to scream any more. We are stuck in the current knowledge, and we are stuck with fetish objects and dead objects. We are affectless after all. Modernism is waning like a daydream. The modern and the postmodern remain utterly distinct in their meaning with respect to the social function, the economic system, and the sphere of culture in the contemporary world. While the modern is a nostalgic dream haunting us like a specter, the postmodern with its “plagues” is before our own eyes. “Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious,” as Jameson bleakly puts it, “namely, that this whole global, yet American, post- modern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.”[16]

Nevertheless, today’s art, the post-post aesthetic, has taken a new flight. In his brilliant account of postmodern art, the American art critic Donald Kuspit writes:

There is an air of sophisticated ennui to postmodern art—appropriation art is the prime example—suggesting that art has become meaningless however much meaning it claims to have. The postart blurring of the boundary between art and life supposedly remedies the boredom and meaninglessness of both, for if life is arty it is no longer boring, even if artiness is boring. Art becomes empty and hollow when it no longer makes life feel timely and vivid—when it no longer seduces us to life, as Nietzsche said—and when it no longer makes us the gift of immortality by suggesting it through its own aesthetic substance.

In short, art these postmodern days seems to have become another depressing way of passing time rather than of reaching beyond time, which is what it was for van Gogh. Art is no longer the path to salvation it was for him, but rather confirms that life is damned because it is meaningless, which is ultimately why art is meaningless, since it can do nothing to rescue life from itself. Today’s postart seduces us to death, not life. Warhol is the ultimate postmodern postartist, for he neither knows nor cares whether his business art—or is it art business?—is more art than business or more business than art. This suggests that he neither knows nor cares what art is, indicating that he doesn’t believe in it—certainly not the way van Gogh did. More particularly, Warhol doesn’t believe that it has anything to do with eternity. It can no longer envision a world that is not run like a business, that is, a world in which everything is for sale and nothing is priceless. The void left by the absence of faith in art is filled by the presence of money. Art’s existence comes to depend on it, as though without money to sustain it, it would collapse into non-art. But Warhol’s work shows that it is possible to be both art and non-art—it’s the postmodern way of being nothing in particular while seeming to be everything. If money is only as meaningful as what it buys, and if what it buys is not meaningful as art—art that is unequivocally art rather than art whose identity is equivocally split between art and non-art—then money becomes meaningless. Money can only compromise itself by buying into something compromised in itself—something as inherently flawed as business art. If postmodern business art also signals the bankruptcy and meaninglessness of modern nonbusi- ness art, then it is completely nihilistic.[17]

Are we too smart and critical to be guided by art to the hope for health, peace, and life? Are we seduced instead by art toward death (meaninglessness, neurotic impulse, or schizophrenia)? To- day’s art, then, is not only meaningless but also harmful. Likewise, if consumption is only as meaningful as what we consume, and if what we consume does not rescue or free us from being objectified, then consumption is a destruction of life. “But one must say,” Derrida writes, “that if the commodity corrupts (art, philosophy, religion, morality, law, when their works become market values), it is because the becoming-commodity already attested to the value it puts in danger. For example: if a work of art can become a com- modity, and if this process seems fated to occur, it is also because the commodity began by putting to work, in one way or another, the principle of an art.”[18] This post-post aesthetic and this post-post consumption are the end of history.

If Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) ended the unrepeatable heroic history of the changing status of objects and their representation with the notion of the “readymade,” then Warhol brought traditional aesthetics to its end, that is: commodity consumption. As Baudrillard notes, “Art is then only an almost magic operation: the object is transferred in its banality into an aesthetics that turns the entire world into a readymade.” He continues: “all the banality of the world passes into aesthetics, and inversely, all aesthetics becomes banal: a commutation takes place between the two fields of banality and aesthetics, one that truly brings aesthetics in the traditional sense to an end.”[19] Today’s aesthetic production is integrated into commodity production. Art is affluence. Affluence is democracy. Democracy is Global-ness. Global-ness is the end of history.

Duchamp freed us from aesthetics and art, but we have wound up having neither objects nor art, since “the banality of art is mixed up with the banality of the real world—Duchamp’s gesture, with the automatic transfer of the object.”[20] It is a good show—very much like a magician turning roses into doves. Everything is readymade today: art, food, culture, politics, and ourselves. In short, life is readymade. Readymade is art. Everything turns into a pure object, says Baudrillard:

Simulacra are no longer simulacra, they have become materially evident—fetishes, perhaps, both completely depersonalized, desymbolized and yet at maximum intensity, directly invested as medium—just like fetish objects, with no aesthetic mediation. That may be where our most superficial, stereotyped objects recover the power of exorcism, equal to sacrificial masks. Exactly like masks, which absorb the identity of the actors, the dancers, the spectators, and which have the function to provoke a sort of thaumaturgic (traumaturgic?) vertigo.[21]

This resurrection of objects is the foremost religion today. Jeff Koons’s three-foot-tall stainless-steel Rabbit sold at Christie’s for $91.1 million in May 2019. It officially became the most expensive work sold by a living artist in history. Koons claims to use materialism to seduce the viewer and to meet the needs of the viewer just as the church does. According to Koons, the church is a great master manipulator of materialism; going to church makes people feel as though they are participating in social mobility and their needs are being met.[22] Kuspit says, “Koons was a stockbroker before he became a postartist, indicating that he knew where the real money was, and knew something about market.”[23] Koons’s personal life is his art and his art is his life; there is no boundary or difference in his reality—the postmodern way of being nothing in particular but of being everything, which has been exalted and bought by the public. The problem is: what the public has bought is the void left by the absence of faith in life, which has been filled by the presence of money. Baudrillard calls it a “conspiracy of art” between the creator and consumer.

There is a shameful complicity shared by creators and consumers in a silent communion as they consider strange, inexplicable objects that only refer to themselves and to the idea of art. The real conspiracy, however, lies in art’s complicity with itself, its collusion with reality, becoming complicit as the mere return-image of this Integral Reality. There is no longer any possible difference in art. Only the integral calculation of reality remains. Art now is only an idea prostituted in its production. . . .[24]
What could miraculously reassure us about the essence of art today? Art is simply what is discussed in the art world, in the artistic community that frantically stares at itself. Even the “creative” act replicates itself to become nothing more than the sign of its own operation—the true subject of a painter is no longer what he or she paints but the very fact that he or she paints. The painter paints the fact that he or she paints. In that way, at least, the idea of art is saved.
This is only one aspect of the conspiracy.
The other aspect is the viewer who, most of the time, does not understand anything, and consumes his or her own culture twice removed. The viewer literally consumes the fact that he or she does not understand it and that it has no necessity to it other than the cultural imperative of belonging to the integrated circuit of culture. But culture itself is only an epiphenomenon of global circulation. . . .[25]
Yes, but here is the point: it is all the more necessary to talk about art now that there is nothing to say about it. Paradoxically, the movement to democratize art only reinforced the privilege of the idea of art, culminating in the banal tautology “art is art.” Everything can supposedly be summed up in this circular definition. . . .[26]
That was its true democracy, not in allowing everyone access to aesthetic pleasure but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which each object without distinction would have its fifteen minutes of fame (especially objects without distinction). Everyone is equal, everything is great. The upshot came in the transformation of art and the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting out, gener- ating deconstructed objects that deconstruct us in turn.[27]

Now, stuck in between the post-post aesthetic and post-post consumption, how much do we know ourselves? Perhaps not too much. You wonder whether you are wasting your time with such non-sense. However, the real non-sense here is that you do not have any time to waste in consumer society. Like air or water, as an absolute and inalienable dimension, time is no longer “an a priori, transcendent dimension, which pre-exists its contents.”[28] You no longer have time because time has been taken and exploited by the system of consumption. Time becomes the rarest and most precious commodity in consumer society. It is true of working time, since it is bought and sold. It is truer that “free time itself has to be directly or indirectly purchased before it can be ‘consumed’ ” today.[29] Baudrillard writes,

Of most objects, one can still say that they have a certain use-value, which is in theory dissociable from their exchange-value. But is this true of time? Where is the use-value that could be defined by some objective function or specific practice? For this is the exigency which lies at the bottom of ‘free’ time: that we restore to time its use-value, that we liberate it as an empty dimension to fill it with its individual freedom. Now, in our system, time can only be ‘liberated’ as object, as chronometric capital of years, hours, days, weeks, to be ‘invested’ by each person ‘as he pleases’. It is already, therefore, no longer in fact ‘free’, since it is governed in its chronometry by the total abstraction which is that of the system of production.[30]

Leisure is no longer everyone’s private property. “The demand underlying leisure is, therefore, an insolubly contradictory and truly desperate one.”[31] Says Baudrillard: “Of leisure we may say that ‘When you “have” time, it is no longer free.’ And the contradiction here is not one of the terms, but of substance. This is the tragic paradox of consumption.”[32] According to Baudrillard, we are tethered to “our” time “as Prometheus was tethered to his rock, tethered to the Promethean myth of time as productive force.”[33] In the end, “it is we who have become the excrement of money, it is we who have become the excrement of time.”[34]

Now that we have rambled through these long citations of text, we have only a little idea about what the modern language and knowledge, and philosophy and art, can do to the self, and to you and me in everyday life. We have only a little idea about what kind of self we deserve. The little answer is simple: it is all about the awareness of the self—the modern or the postmodern, whichever suits your feeling at the moment—the same awareness of the self that mankind has gazed upon from the beginning. It is as Foucault says:

The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individu- alization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.[35]

Our problem is obviously about what we know, not about what we don’t know. The imperative is not to discover what we know, but to refuse what we know; and not to innovate or deconstruct what we know but to unlearn and relearn what we know. This civilizational and cultural horizon is clearly bleak. It is futile to engage the attempt to find a deeper, hidden, universal reason to solve our problem. Whatever the discipline or practice that concerns us is one culturally and practically mediated by a form of actual experience.

Culture, as the soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in gestures and works, as its mortal transient body, obnoxious to law, number and causality:

As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world-history:

As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and understanding: —this is the language through which alone a soul can tell of what it undergoes.[36]

[1] Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art, (Princeton and Chichester, UK: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 127.
[2] Daniel Bell, quoted in Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 6.
[3] Ibid., 7.
[4] Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 86.
[5] Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner, (London and Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 1998), p. 115.
[6] Ibid., 115.
[7] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 269.
[8]Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by Ames Hodges, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2005), p. 78.
[9] Ibid., 89-90.
[10] Ibid., 90.
[11] Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. Edited by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 244-245.
[12] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 11-12.
[13] Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, (London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 93.
[14] Jameson, Postmodernism, 8.
[15] Ibid., 8.
[16] Ibid., 5.
[17] Donald Kuspit, The End of Art, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 159-161.
[18] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 1994), p. 204.
[19] Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 89.
[20] Ibid., 90.
[21] Ibid., 123.
[22] Caldwell, Jeff Koon, 99.
[23] Kuspit, The End Of Art, 83.
[24] Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 89.
[25] Ibid., 91.
[26] Ibid., 91-92.
[27] Ibid., 92.
[28] Ibid., 151.
[29] Ibid., 153.
[30] Ibid., 152.
[31] Ibid., 155.
[32] Ibid., 152.
[33] Ibid., 154
[34] Ibid., 155.
[35] Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 216.
[36] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West; Volume I: Form and Actuality. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 180.