Baudrillard: Now why do you try to save culture?
Culture is, as in modern organisation, not
as in anthropological reality.
As an anthropological reality, it generates
itself and it perishes by itself.
As animal species; it is a singularity.
It has its birth and its death.
And so it is, you don’t need to, to attend
to save it.
It have its own way, and its own death.
For me it is useless to attend, to artificially
perpetuate a system because culture became
a system of values.
Its no more an organic organisation, a symbolic
organisation of a society, it is now a system
of values and of market values too; but a
system of aesthetic values, not so much economic
values that is not so dangerous.
But a system of aesthetic values, it is very
[inaudible] proposition, culture perishes
from this mixture of symbolic and values,
that’s [inaudible].
Symbolic order, symbolic order of a culture
is no value, value is an economic structure
and with infiltration, contamination of science,
of rituals, and so on; an aesthetic circulation,
cultural goals are aesthetic goals that’s
the beginning of the end.
Wolfgang: You got the point exactly because
you stockpile it, its not culture.
Culture should die, that is the error of culture.
 It is an anthropological event, and should
not be preserved for eternity, even if it
sometimes happens.
Baudrillard: Ja, ja.
 I am only pessimistic, but you are a murderer.
Question: But isn’t that culture differánce?
If there’s no culture, there is no more
differánce?
Wolfgang: His question is that is not the
key to culture differánce?
Baudrillard: The difference.
No, I mean we are in the culture of the difference
and culture as difference, in this multicultural
organisation.
I mean culture as singularity is more than
difference; difference will be easily organised
in a structure, in a system, system of differences.
That is what results in generating meaning
and so on.
But, culture as such has no finality, has
no meaning, it is an act, it is a symbolic
act, and in a sense it is beyond any differences.
Differences are only oppositions and so on;
but singularity is an acting, a symbolic acting,
a collective acting, and it is not different.
Primitive societies and cultures are not different,
they are very singular, that is not the same.
Today, culture, many cultures, several cultures,
all culture of the world, are in a multicultural
ensemble as differences; and it’s a mega-culture
of difference but its an involution in regard
to the originality of culture, of singular
culture.
Wolfgang: more like brands, you know, different
brands.
Insofar as they are different but they are
not, different.
Baudrillard: And then they can be juxtaposed,
be collected, all together in museum or...
everywhere.
Question: Perhaps, do you think that it is
time that artists use their strengths for
something else other than making objects?
Baudrillard: You must say it, I don’t understand
it.
Wolfgang: [German]
Baudrillard: What do you mean, for what?
For interactions?
Collective action?
Performance or something?
Question: I am not sure actually, as an artist...
Wolfgang: He hopes that you know!
Is there anything that an artist can do better
than just contributing to the art market?
Baudrillard: Ah interesting, artists contributing
to art market.
I hope that that’s not the goal of artists.
Anyway, but an extension of art action today
is performance.
It is performance, and in a very general sense,
it is performance.
And maybe artists everywhere have this point:
it is possible to make art with everything.
But I am afraid, that the pure extension of
the ready-made, of interacting, of the ready-made...
No as traditional art had a definition, not
a definition, it is a rule of the game, it
is a game and it has a rule for the game.
To invent another scene than the real, and
of a place, and of a reality, it must not
so work in the real world as a transformative,
maybe as a political, social, therapeutic
finality.
That’s not art.
Art has a strong definition, a more radical
definition than this, for me.
For me.
But today its a fact: art is interacting,
multi-directional activity, but that is a
very degenerated art.
Wolfgang: Radical?
Baudrillard: Radical, for example, separation,
apart from any meaning, any finality, any
causes or effects, and so on; and causality
is, would be a thing itself.
And I cannot say nothing but singularity,
that a singularity as a specific horizon,
a limit; it cannot be anything in the world.
Anything in the world that’s the real world.
Art, would be anything else more variable,
incompatible with reality.
I mean, that was, the traditional art was
very, was integrated in this order, of this
symbolic order of the culture.
But it was something, I would say, with illusion.
It has to do with illusion, with radical illusion.
In the old times, there was no reality at
all, there was but illusion.
Even in the hierarchic order, social order,
hierarchic order, was a dispositif, a symbolic
dispositif of illusion.
But now, this illusion is lost, maybe.
And art has losts its position, lost its privileged
position, inside this symbolic order.
We have, now to do with reality, and unfortunately,
contemporary art has fallen into this trap,
into a trap of reality, and it becomes real...
