the red and/or black

i'm finally giving baudrillard's the transparency of evil: essays on extreme phenonema a proper go after buying it, reading a couple of chapters, and setting it aside for the newest acme novelty library a couple of years ago. it's fucking me up, royally. baudrillard articulates my own fears concerning THE CURRENT STATE OF ART and it's only worried me further. par exemple:

"when everything is aesthetic, nothing is is beautiful or ugly anymore, and art itself disappears...no matter how marginal, or banal, or even obscene it may be, everything is subject to aestheticization, culturalization, museumification. everything is said, everything is exposed, everything acquires the force, or the manner, of a sign*...most present day images...are literally images in which there is nothing to see. they leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences...our images are like icons: they allow us to go on believing in art while eluding the question of its existence."

the italicization is my own and that above bit is a mash-up of passages spanning several pages and chapters. anyway i haven't finished it yet but all i can think about is, well, what next? i'm trying to avoid reading the transparency of evil as a doomsday, "the end is near!" kind of piece (believe me, it's a struggle) and instead am choosing to see our current state of "transaesthetics" as a positive thing. while i agree to some extent that the art world today is in a kind of stasis, i certainly do not believe that it is permanent (stability is never permanent; if economic history has taught me anything it is this). at one point baudrillard states, "the implication is that we have returned to the cultural stage of primitive societies." i'm honestly failing to see this statement as negative as baudrillard has made it out to be. i guess i see this as a chance at a creative blank slate, an opportunity for new representational modes to emerge, and more importantly, new ideas. so fuck a stasis. artists, fight on, your time ain't long.

...i don't know where the fuck that came from but if you read all of it i commend you.

lastly, on the previous year: 2010 was the year of free e and being boy crazy and i'd be a fucking fool not to notice the correlation between the two. being a girl and getting free shit is cool and all but holy fuck do i ever need to chill out in 2011.

*baudrillard uses the word "sign" here to represent the third part of his value system, the structural aspect