ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 7, Number 1 (January, 2010)
Author: Dr. Gerry Coulter
Hans Werner Holzwarth et. al., (2009). 100 Contemporary Artists. Köln: Taschen; Anne Ellegood et. al. (2009). Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Contemporary Sculpture. London: Phaidon.
Therein lies all the duplicity of contemporary art: asserting nullity, insignificance, meaninglessness, striving for nullity when already null and void. Striving for emptiness when already empty. Claiming superficiality in superficial terms (Baudrillard, 2005:27).
You know there’s something on the other side of the screen, whether its fiction or reality (Douglas Gorden in Holzwarth et. al., 2009:234).
I. Conspiracy
Hans Werner Holzwarth’s book: 100 Contemporary Artists, presents us with a vivid illustration (without the author intending one) of Baudrillard’s notion of a conspiracy in contemporary art. It is worth revisiting Baudrillard’s essay before examining this book more closely. Along with Holzwarth I also examine Anne Ellegood et. al., Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Contemporary Sculpture with an eye not merely on banality but the ability of a work of art to create a void in contemporary culture rather than merely becoming part of that culture as so much sculpture does today.
In his short essay “The Conspiracy of Art” (1996) Baudrillard charges contemporary art with having “lost the desire of illusion” (2005:250). Happily this is not entirely the case, but sadly, it almost is. In its depleted state art today raises everything to aesthetic banality which for Baudrillard is at the core of the obscenity of the transaesthetic. He likens it to pornography which, in its drive to remove ambiguity and to make sex transparent, moves into the transsexual – which for Baudrillard is a state in which sex has “nothing to do with the illusion of desire” (Ibid.). During modernism the desire among artists (cubists, expressionists, and abstractionists in particular) for illusion was strong and artists sought to disassociate their work from reality. Today a good deal of art has fallen for the real and, like pornography (which Baudrillard says has permeated all visual techniques to the point of becoming “ambient”), has become insignificant (Ibid.). All that remains is a paradoxical wink – “art laughing at itself in its most hyperrealist form… at its own disappearance in its most artifical form, irony” (Ibid.:26).
Baudrillard’s concern was that contemporary art attempts to recycle itself by storming reality through the elevation of banality, waste, and mediocrity to the level of values and ideologies (Ibid.:27). He met countless performances, installations and other works which he accused of compromising with the state of things. This art, says Baudrillard “claims to be null… and it is null” (Ibid.). For Baudrillard Warhol was truly null because “he reintroduces nothingness to the heart of the image” turning nullity and insignificance into an event and changing it into a fatal strategy of the image (Ibid.:28). Among contemporary artists I think Takashi Murakami’s Oval Buddha fits what Baudrillard was referring to as do the works of many others. Warhol would almost certainly have viewed Murakami as a great businessman/artist as he operates his real art factories in Tokyo, Brooklyn, and Paris where each seeks to insert his mass produced work and capitalize on it in what he refers to as the “superflat culture” of recent globality (Holzwarth, 2009: 400). The conspiracy with superflat sums up the vast majority of what is being produced by contemporary artists and Murakami’s example shows us just what a good business this is. Today, as Warhol dreamed, art is very good business.
1. Takashi Murakami. Oval Buddha (2007) [570 x 320 x 312 cm]
For at least the past two decades contemporary art has been rife with artists who possess a “commercial strategy of nullity” (Baudrillard, 1996:28). And so ours has become a time in which critical judgment is difficult and has largely been replaced by “an amiable, necessarily genial, sharing of nullity” (Ibid.). This is the conspiracy of art for Baudrillard and it cannot be undone because it has successfully “hidden itself from thought behind the mystification of things” (Ibid.). Contemporary art is able to exploit the uncertainty it creates out of this mystification playing upon the guilt of those who do not understand it “or who have not realized there is nothing to understand” (Ibid.). Some could look upon this conspiracy and claim that the bewilderment of many in the art world (inside traders Baudrillard calls them), betrays an intuitive intelligence. Baudrillard, unconvinced, ends by wondering how art can continue, subject as it is to a vast and unregulated art market, “in the midst of critical disillusion and commercial frenzy” (Ibid.:29).
2. Jason Rhoades. Una Momento / The Theatre in My Dick (1996)
A recent conversation between critic Robert Hughes (no fan of Baudrillard, see Hughes, 1990), and international art collector and trend-setter Alberto Mugravé in Mandy Chang’s documentary film The Curse of the Mona Lisa, is telling of the current state of affairs. Here is an excerpt from Hughes’s conversation with an actual (and proud) inside trader in today’s investment oriented art world:
Robert Hughes: “Mr. Mugravé, what is it that you collect?”
Alberto Mugravé: “I collect modern and contemporary art.”
RH: Somebody told me that your father had something like 800 Warhols, is that true?
AM: Yes, that is true.
RH: What is your opinion of Warhol.
AM: (looking increasingly uneasy) “I think that Warhol is probably one of the most visionary artists of our time. He’s an artist that has opened every door for every artist today.”
RH: “Did you know him?”
AM: “No, I never met Andy Warhol.”
RH: “I used to. I thought he was one of the stupidest people I ever met in my life… because he had nothing to say”.
AM: “Well, he didn’t have anything to say probably, verbally, but he said it all with his work.”
RH: “Even the work seems to me to be rather dry and repetitious.”
AM: “Well, that’s what’s amazing about it… it is repetitious in the same way that when you read four or five newspapers each day you are reading the same news but you are still reading five or six newspapers because the more you read, the more you see, the more they stick to you”.
RH: “You see, I’m perplexed by Warhol because, while he had a considerable influence on media, on the art of painting, I don’t think so much. (Long pause…) Do you think that your activities have an impact on the price of works of art?”
AM: Yes we influence other people into liking the artists we are interested in.”
RH: “Would you like to see your impulses as a collector translated into museums practice somewhere?”
AM: “I think that would be an amazing thing to happen, absolutely”. (In Chang, 2008).
II. Conspirators and Non-Conspirators
Holzwarth’s effort to make a book is caught up in the very dilemmas Baudrillard identified. They acknowledge that Taschen has, in its Art Now series (every two years since 1999), “never [been] about retrospectively collecting ‘the best’ of the time. The focus was always on what was coming, the next stage” (Holzwarth, 2009:8). As such, the book is an elaborate sacrifice to the idea that critical appraisal and aesthetic judgment are over. All we can do is “attempt to combine current insight… on trends and traditions that have stirred heated debate…[on] prominent representatives of a younger generation [formative figures are also included] which is blazing its own trails” (Ibid.). This is also what investors like Mugravé do and they are now more important than curators and museums in determining what value art has. The point of the current volume is to acknowledge that art is now completely indefinable and to summarize the past decade (the book is a two volume summary of what Taschen has learned from its Art Now series). Here the art book industry also steps away from centre stage allowing the likes of Mugravé to occupy it.
Since three of the “artists” are two-person partnerships there are actually 103 artists presented in the book. Their average age is 45.1 years and the vast bulk of them come from the North and West of our planet (40 Americans and 47 Europeans [15 of whom are Germans and 16 of whom are British]). One is from Iran, one from Lebanon, one from Canada, one from Mexico, three from Brazil, one from Argentina, three from China, three from Japan, one from Korea and one from Indonesia. 28 of the artists included in the book are women. Taschen has broadened the lens only slightly from what we would have found a decade ago in such books (see, for example, Lucie-Smith, 1998).
Thirty four of the artists included are primarily painters, thirty-two make sculpture, twenty four (many of whom are sculptors) also do installations [and some create environments], fifteen are photographers, and eight work with film and video. These categories are of course blurred and several of the artists work with multiple and or mixed media including tapestry, ink, spray paint (graffiti), and pencil. According to the biographies included at the end only four are dead – none longer than Basquiat (20 years). His presence in this book is interesting as it promises to look at works produced over the past ten years. Dead artists outnumber artists from France as there are no representatives of contemporary French art in this vast two volume set (unless we count the America Nan Goldin who now lives in Paris). This is a statement about one of two things – 1) the focus of the book and/ or 2) the quality of French art. Given that this book does not care for quality as much as trends perhaps the French will take it all as a compliment not to be included. Certainly the work of Joseph Nechvatal (Paris) might have been represented – then again, maybe it is considered to be too thoughtful.
3. Cai Guo-Qiang. Inopportune: Stage One (2004) [9 cars, sequenced multi-channel light tubes, Guggenheim, New York]
In terms of representing artists who produce banality I think it fair to say that the book does a marvelous job (without of course, intending to) and this is ironically, its great strength. Among the more banal works included are Franz Ackermann’s post Warholian understanding of painting meets tourism (the real can be very punishing even to a painter of talent). Cai Guo-Qiang’s spectacle’s, George Condo’s caricatures, John Curran’s figures, Thomas Demand’s photographs of interiors he creates (not unlike Jeff Wall who manipulates environments to make his light boxes), Nathalie Djurberg’s grotesque animations, Urs Fischer’s sculptural gestures, Ellen Gallagher’s lost fragments, Mark Grotjahn’s pitiful abstractions, Subodh Gupta’s river of kitchen utensils, Thomas Hirschhorn’s politics, Gary Hume’s enamels, Martin Kippenberger’s and Albert Oehlen’s willfully bad painting, Jeff Koon’s repeated banalities, Takashi Murakami’s mass produced objects, Ernesto Neto’s hanging foam things, Jason Rhoades unfocussed installations (and those of several others), each are left to stand in for art which has lost the desire for illusion. Everywhere the real punishes and obliterates an art that desires only it.
In its effort to be everything to elements in the art world which seek to be nothing the book is without focus. That said it does include thoughtful works from a number of contemporary artists who resist the banal including: Ai Weiwei, Doug Aitkin, Darren Almond, Banksy, Cecily Brown, Maurizio Cattelan, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Tracey Emin, Tom Friedman, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Mona Hatoum, Damian Hurst, Anish Kapoor, Sarah Lucas, Vera Lutter, Yoshitomo Nara, Shirin Neshat, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, Thomas Struth, and Erwin Wurm. What Taschen missed in its rush to market with another big book was that these (among the 103 artists they decided to work with) were the core substance of a much better, detailed, and analytical book. It is heartening at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century to find one quarter of the artists and works selected for such a book to be those who resist the overwhelming surge of banality and will to nullity that concerned Baudrillard. Perhaps if Holzwarth et. al. were given more time and freedom by their editors, a more in-depth analysis of these artists (and others) who resist the conspiracy of art, might have produced the book readers deserve rather than a catalogue of trends. Critical judgment is out of vogue but it is still possible – the problem is, in the era of the mega-art book aimed at the most democratic cross section of consumers possible (what we also know to be the lowest common denominator), most of the books we meet concerning contemporary art in the new mega-bookstore are interested in fashion rather than analysis. This is a characteristic of many contemporary art museums as well so it is difficult to blame the publishing industry for mimicking it. We have here the same sort of thoughtless enterprises as brought global capitalism to its knees in 2008 and may well do so to the art world or at least the publishing industry riding its coat tails.
Instead of any significant analysis or development of a critical position we are given a one paragraph long vague introduction to each artist, which often in a full blaze of conspiracy, self-reference the art world which has established these artists as its key trend makers. That said, given the state of affairs and the competition which Taschen faces, and for all of its problems, this book is a sincere effort to identify the leading trends. What is not engaged is the problem of seeking trends over depth.
Art need not be beautiful but it must be interesting. It cannot be allowed to evade its illusory function in the pursuit of trends in the real which in turn overlay themselves on the art world as simulacral trends. It is the job of the art book publisher who wishes to be a quality company, as Taschen has repeatedly claimed, to engage with these dilemmas. Here the book fails in a way many have regretfully come to expect in recent years. The failure on the part of the art world to take Baudrillard seriously comes with its costs.
A great strength of this book over most of its recent competitors is that it allows the artists, many of whom are principle conspirators, to speak for themselves – at least a sentence or two – concerning their art and practice. Franz Ackermann represents the artists who have given up in an important sense and gone over to representing ‘real’ banalities when he posits the death of alterity: “Foreignness, in the sense of adventure and exoticism, no longer exists” (12). Everyone knows this is only true in the cultural centres of the world (or among sociologists) and that singularities persist everywhere. Glenn Brown confesses: “I’m rather like Dr. Frankenstein, constructing paintings out of the residue of other artist’s work” (84). Sarah Morris acknowledges: “I am looking at reality and playing fast and loose with it” (394).
Against such remarks, and in defence of art as illusion, Cecily Brown says: “I’m interested in the human need or desire to represent itself. …I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but its completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting” (76). Photographer Rineke Dijkstra also speaks to illusion as being at the core of her work which records the masks we never entirely remove: “For me it is essential to understand that everyone is alone. Not in the sense of lonliness, but rather, in the sense that no one can completely understand someone else” (130).
4. Tracey Emin. Installation view from Turner Prize competition (1999, Tate)
Further against the art imitating the real Peter Doig says: “Often I am trying to create a numbness. I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words” (142). The much maligned Tracey Emin, who’s emotional works have become increasingly poetic, adds that it is important for the artist to put themselves through “a very hard time” (172). If an artist embraces illusion and uncertainty in its positive forms clarity is not the goal of the artist even in terms of one’s own practice. Tom Friedman, who pushes his work to more enigmatic states, says: “…what unifies what I do is taking something that is crystal clear to me, something that I seem to know, and finding the closer I get and the more carefully I inspect it, the less clear it becomes” (202). Here he sounds like Baudrillard writing about philosophy as he practiced it himself (see Coulter: 2008 [2009], 2010). In Robert Gober’s words, also not unlike Baudrillard, it is about getting past the problem of meaning: “I always try to get people to focus less on finding ‘meaning’, or ‘theme’ in the work…” (216). Or, in the words of photographer Andreas Gursky, who’s work is increasingly abstract: “Art should not be delivering a report on reality” (256) and Mona Hatoum who adds; “Art can’t be compared to journalism; it can’t discuss concrete issues” (270). Art, as illusion, beyond the appearances of the real, is not entirely dead yet.
These artists also meet Hughes’ criteria for having something to say – both inside and outside of their works. Despite it all, some art continues in the contemporary, against banality, and against the conspiracy although no one goes unscathed. Give Jeff Koons marks for honesty when he admits; “I don’t believe that you can create art” (324). Against Koons Wangechi Mutu stresses the need for art to “complicate how people see things” (406). While Koons himself might boast that his work does this it is only so by way of banality, avoiding complexity at all costs. Perhaps Pipilotti Rist says it best; “We are trying to build visions that people can experience with their whole bodies, because virtual worlds cannot replace the need for sensual perceptions (528). For Rudolf Stingel illusion concerns dislocation (552) (as it does for Ai Weiwei).
5. Ai Weiwei. Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1994)
III. The Excluded ‘Artists’
Among the twenty-six artists identified above who’s work goes against the grain of the conspiracy of art I suggest adding the following artists who understand that the main business or art is illusion: the post apocalyptic painters Odd Nerdrum, Fan Bo, and Wang Long; the classically skilled painter Lisa Yuskavage who shows us that
6. Fan Bo. The Endless Dusk (2004)
women are not women as men have assumed; Francis Bacon (not dead as long as Basquiat) who’s painting respected for the mask; the veils of Gerhard Richter; Sophie Calle who probes the mysteries and enigmas of the everyday world; Janet Cardiff’s soundscapes; the challenges to the flesh and ideology of Eric Fischl and Lucien Freud; the illusions floating on the surface of the “real” made by Andy Goldsworthy; Ann Hamilton’s constant challenges to the real to expose itself as illusion; the architectural art of Frank Gehry, Tadeo Ando, Jean Nouvel, and Zaha Hadid; the process art of Robert Rauschenberg – ever wary of the avant-garde and the investors of the art world; Richard Serra’s uncompromising illusions in steel (works that only time and rust can complete; Dale Chihuly who probes the illusory in glass; Cornelia Parker’s explorations of dark matter; Evan Holloway’s delicate sculptural touch; the photography of Zwelethu Mthethwa, Hellen van Meane, Arno Nollen; and Canadian painter Betty Goodwin who’s work points to the monstrous foundations of the social. These, along with those identified above, total fifty contemporary artists [no doubt there are others], unified by only a desire to resist the thousands who actively conspire with the real against illusion. If Taschen, or any publisher, wants it, there is a book to be made about art which is actually about practitioners who are artists with a critical criteria at your disposal. Granted these fifty, and perhaps a few more, are dwarfed by the 10,000 contemporary artists who have lost, if they ever had, a desire for illusion in their work. If we seek only trends the lowest common denominator will continue to reign. If we seek out art there we will find illusion.
7. Betty Goodwin. Without Cease, The Earth Faintly Trembles (1988)
IV. Sculpture’s Ever Expanding Field
A work of art is a singularity, and all these singularities can create holes, interstices, voids, etc., in the metastatic fullness of culture (Baudrillard, 2002:21).
Ellegood’s (et. al.) Vitamin 3D: New Perspectives in Contemporary Sculpture promises to be “an up-to-the-minute survey of current global developments in contemporary sculpture and its close relative, installation” (5). Ellegood is very aware that the boundaries of the medium have been stretched to the limits of credulity but appear to possess little or no critical apparatus with which to deal with the fact that some sculpture today not only deploys garbage, it is garbage (see also Baudrillard [1996] on worthlessness). The book also acknowledges that much of contemporary sculpture is deeply indebted to Duchamp’s [terrorist] challenge (Baudrillard 2005, 1978) of the readymade. What Ellegood et. al. do not consider is that Duchamp set sculpture on a course of banality – they prefer to sculpture today as having “a wildly inclusive breadth and depth” (5).Ellegood et. al. acknowledge that the work of the 117 artists in the book have little in common aside from a “profusion of cultural and historical references” (7) – this profusion of references is the name the real often travels under today.
I think we should take seriously Baudrillard’s notion that a work of art is a singularity capable of opening a void in the “metastatic fullness of culture”. This idea leads me to ask: how many works included in this large art book might meet Baudrillard’s criteria? I believe this to be an important measure to hold against the official art world’s criteria for something to be considered a work of art. In a time when critical judgment has fallen out of favour in the art world over the judgment of the market, Baudrillard is among the few thinkers who provide us with critical concepts with which to engage with art.
Ellegood writes a concise introduction to the volume “Motley Efforts: Sculpture’s Ever-Expanding Field” which serves as an apology for the state of the art today drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” ([1978] 1985).
Krauss suggested that in its expanded condition sculpture might collapse under all of the weight it was now expected to encompass (Ibid.:12). Ellegood et. al., as dutiful members of the art world, cannot acknowledge the collapse which has taken place and choose to throw up their hands at sculpture’s “current state of being” (6). Leaving aside how the works included in this book do, or do not, participate in illusion, when examined with an eye to Baudrillard’s notion that a work of art can open a hole in the culture, we find few that do. How many of the sculptors included do this? How many other merely immerse themselves in the hyper real metastasis of today’s art world? From this reading I can say that “art” as art, is peripheral to the majority of efforts taking place in the art world today but that, happily, art is not quite dead yet.
a) Sculpture Which Opens A Void
8. Rachel Harrison. Alexander the Great (2007)
Harrison’s Alexander the Great accepts and attempts to surpass Warhol’s challenge to art. Her work represents our era as Michelangelo represented his. She engages us with a clone like figure – a mannequin which represents the social clone figure in our culture – the consumer. This figure surfs our mass produced wasteland on a cloud (some see a boat) of bon-bon advertising colour while holding in its arms a garbage can which is itself part of the rupture of the real into the virtual – racing cars and the kitsch which surrounds sport (in this case NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon). This works opens up a rupture in the culture by placing in the art gallery a central symbol of our times as Duane Hansen’s figures did more than a generation ago. In Harrison’s case however, there is nothing whatsoever that is real about this figure no more than there is in any of us when we are in a shopping mall or one of the countless new box stores which take over the land surrounding cities and along expressways at the rate Alexander himself once expanded Macedonia. Harrison rips open the belly of our culture by placing a virtual object – as a representation of a broken life – in the space of art. As we spend time with this work its poignancy creeps in and we feel its overpowering sadness.
9. Sterling Ruby. Supermax (detail, 2008)
Sterling Ruby opens an important void in our culture with her art the way the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib by American GI’s did. Ruby challenges the exhibition spaces of art to examine their connections to the blood of war, torture, all forms of patriarchal violence and death which reside along the surfaces of the underside of our all culture. Indeed these things are the foundation on which culture is erected and today stands. With Ruby’s work we can no longer duck into the gallery to escape this underside as the space of art (in this case LA MoCA) drips and oozes with blood. This work extends the insights of that of Betty Goodwin (see Coulter, 2009). It makes mainstream culture and its proponents uncomfortable to be near this work as some of Hans Haacke’s work did thirty years ago.
b) Sculpture as Culture
10. Geoffrey Farmer. Pale Fire Freedom Machine (detail, 2005)
Geoffrey Farmer’s Pale Fire Freedom Machine represents so many of the thousands of mind numbingly banal works which cram the thousands of square kilometers of space in the world’s contemporary art museums. Here is a work that is so far removed from the desire for illusion that it creates only disillusion. To its credit the work devours itself as eventually all of the furniture in a given location is burned in the incinerator apparatus which hangs from the ceiling. The incinerator is itself a liminal piece torn between art and kitsch as designed by decorator Dominique Imbert (http://www.focus-creation.com/UK/intro.html). Even in a time when the avant-garde is dead, it is still possible to continue to process materials for the sake of process as did Rauschenberg. But we are a very long way from the joy of process in this work which resides only along the slick surface of its own triteness.
11a. Simmon Starling. Autoxylopyrocycloboros (film still, 2006)
11b. Simon Starling. Autoxylopyrocycloboros (film still, 2006)
Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006) was designed to operate briefly before sinking into Scotland’s Loch Long (video: http://v2v.cc/help). Simon Starling here acts as the captain of the small wooden steam craft he has reclaimed (he found it under water) and which operates only by burning wood from the boat itself. Loch Long is home to the UK’s Trident submarine base and its neighbor, a large peace camp. Starling can and has produced some remarkable art [Infestation Piece (2006-08) and Kakteenhaas (2002)] and he was (rightly in my view), awarded the Turner prize in 2005. With Autoxylopyrocycloboros he crosses the line into a masturbatory version of futile banality. The work functions in the opposite manner of his imaginative Kakteenhaas which included a reconfigured Volvo 240 engine which functions to keep a cactus alive in the gallery space. In Autoxylopyrocycloboros process borrows cheaply from distant and mutant memories of Ludditism. The problem Starling encounters is in attempting to make the concept real – this is where the “work” evaporates. As such there is nothing left to transpire on the lake that is not a banal antonym of the original concept. This is a failed attempt at art that overshoots its mark and creates only autotheism. Like Farmer’s Pale Fire Freedom Machine process yields only a banal memory of a concept that would be better to remain a non-event. Not all concepts can survive being made into art.
V. Conclusion
I will not be holding my breath waiting for the large popular art book which adopts an analytical position. It seems we are destined now to sift among the detritus for what fragments of art as may exist. This essay has outlined one such possibility – the book that seeks out those who defy the conspiracy of art. While Baudrillard overstated his case, as he usually did with good effect, he causes us to look for the exceptions. Sadly, the presence of so few who understand illusion in today’s art world, points to figure who is rapidly becomming an extreme phenomenon – the artist. Perhaps Taschen is itself too deeply embedded in the business side of the art world to undertake this task. However, to their credit, Holzwarth et. al. did get 26 out of 103 right and that is a fairly good score in today’s big art book marketplace. It is far higher than Ellegood et. al. score.
Art is not over – not yet. It has however taken an awful beating in recent decades and artists are as much to blame for this as anyone as Baudrillard recognized two decades ago. Ironically, Holzwarth and Ellegood illustrate this very nicely.
About the Author
Dr. Gerry Coulter is from Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
References
Jean Baudrillard (1996, 2005). “The Conspiracy of Art”. In The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. New York: MIT Press. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer.
Jean Baudrillard (with Jean Nouvel) (2002). The Singular Objects of Architecture. University of Minnesota Press.
Mandy Chang (director, 2008). The Curse of the Mona Lisa. London: Oxford Film and Television.
Gerry Coulter (2008 [2009]). “Jean Baudrillard’s Writing About Writing”. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 4, Number 3, Special Anthology Issue: “Remembering Baudrillard”. A later version of this paper also appears in Russian translation in the journal Khora: The Journal of Modern and Comparative Foreign Philosophy, as “Удовольствие от письма” (“The Pleasure of Writing”). Volume 2: 29-34(2009): http://www.jkhora.nard.ru/2009-02-02.pdf
Gerry Coulter (2009). “Betty Goodwin’s Monstrous Art”. In International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 7, Number 1 (July 2009).
Hans Werner Holzwarth et. al. (2009). 100 Contemporary Artists. Köln: Taschen.
Robert Hughes (1990). “Jean Baudrillard: America”. In Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists. New York: Penguin: 375-87.
Rosalind Krauss ([1978] 1985). “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Essays. New York: MIT Press.
Edward Lucie-Smith (1998). Artoday. London: Phaidon.