This is interesting:

http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/lotringer.htm

Sylvere Lotringer essay about Baudrillard's Conspiracy of Art. Published in 1996, declares art dead-ish:

"Most contemporary art is engaged in just this: appropriating banality, the throwaway, mediocrity as value and as ideology. In these innumerable installations and performances, what is going on is merely a compromise with the state of things – and simultaneously with all the past forms of the history of art. An admission of unoriginality, banality, and worthlessness, elevated into a perverse aesthetic value, if not indeed a perverse aesthetic pleasure. …it is mediocrity raised to the second power."

I never read this--I am not sure why. I got into grad school just as the Matrix was at the end of its arc--there was a sense that Baudrillard wasn't very cool or only for the digital crowd...

Anyone read the original Baudrillard essay? SL's analysis is pretty potent today:

"Going nowhere art came to nothing – and everything – simply staying there, grinding its teeth, losing its bite, then losing the point of it all. It is now floating in some kind of vapid, all consuming euphoria traversed by painful spurts of lucidity, sleep-walking in its sleep, not yet dead, hardly alive, but still thriving."