The Conspiracy of Art by Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard is a social theorist (how you get that sweet job title I do not know). Baudrillard is known for his reasoning on such diverse topics as AIDS, and Gulf War in terms of their interconnectivity to other things. Baudrillard uses this principle to argue that in our present 'global' society, wherein technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning, meaning's self-referentiality has prompted... a world where meaning has been effaced and society has been reduced to an opaque mass, where the 'real' has been reduced to the self-referential signs of its existence.

I recently purchased his book Conspiracy of Art and like what I've read so far. It's one of those great books you'll never fully understand the first time through and will likely spend a lot of time reading and re-reading his densely packed sentences. In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.