What is contemporary Arts

• Jean-Baudrillard -A French post-modern theorist who showed us that the contemporary world is anything but simple. Indeed, even a cursory

  glance of the general state of the contemporary world tells us the

  complexity and difficulty of our current project.
• Baudrillard - has a more pernicious

  diagnosis.
• The contemporary world is in trouble because it no longer knows

  reality as it is.
• Baudrillard distinguishes between 3 kinds of values that structure this system of objects:

  -use value

  -exchange value

  -sign value
• Use value - For old-school Marxism, this is the natural value of things.
• The sign value - is the most troubling because it is the first signal that we are now living in a hyperreal world, that we have lost contact of the

  real: the signifier without signified.
• sign-value - which now orders the world as we know it today: the

  abstract code.
• Who said, “the medium is the message.”?

  
  

  -Marshall McLuhan
• For Baudrillard, our medium is no longer just language, or all other medias. Our medium are now the empty signifiers (or signifiers which signify other signifiers which signify other signifiers, and so on endlessly).
• simulacra - is merely the trace of something, something left behind by the presence of something.
• For Baudrillard, simulacra has three orders, the first is the closest

  to reality, while the last is farthest, Name the 3.

  -Natural imitations

  -Productive copies

  -Code and simulation
• third order of the simulacra shows us that the world is no longer known

  as it is in reality but known as something else apart from what it is,

  through the code of whatever systematizes it.
• The contemporary world is thus best described as post-modern in the

  sense that modernity emphasizes rationality (which, in economic terms simply means ‘egoism’) and order whereas the contemporary world seems to be a mixture of everything else at once, which simply cannot be grasped

  by mere rationality.
• Baudrillard, among other post-modern thinkers, thought that even

  the first critical project, i.e. Marxism, was insufficient.
• Baudrillard, together with other post-modern thinkers, proposes what is called symbolic exchange.
• Exchange is now easily understood as something economic, indeed something that has to do with value and price.
• symbolic exchange is the idea that exchange should not be primarily

  economic but symbolic.
• The social nature of the human being means that humans are also symbolic beings, and this is manifested in language.
• the human being enshrines the real

  into practical symbols within rituals and practices.