Aesthetics of Jean Baudrillard: Metamorphoses of Love to Postmodernism

Jean Baudrillard's aesthetics is analyzed with reference to the perception of postmodernism culture. The author examines the main aesthetic categories Baudrillard used, such as simulacrum, artistic image, space of object. Aesthetic principles are determined in order to show Baudrillard as a bright representative of postmodernism, who enriched a categorial instruments of postmodernism asthetics. The conception of the artistic image in Baudrillard's aesthetics is considered; it changes in accordance with the contexts of Baudrillard's criticism: from a positive idea, when the artistic image is able to "model" reality for the sake of its "transformation", to a negative one ("wicked nature of image"), when the artistic image provokes the emergence of superreality that makes the artist "conceptually rape the image". The function of the notion of object is revealed as a degree of its aestheticism in Baudrillard's conception. In particular, some principal functions of object are characterized, which make it socially aesthetic: the object's space and color. It is shown that, in Baudrillard's conception, the ideas of artistic image, the space and color of object are unstable and mobile categories that change depending on the context, which means they can be used for an indirect admiration of simulacrum and modern art in general. Being a postmodernism critic, Baudrillard uses the potential of philosophical methods only in postmodernism. Criticism with reference to postmodernism is impossible because it leads to a postmodernism situation. The author illustrates it with an example of Baudrillard's aesthetics: for the philosopher, criticism appears due to the genuine admiration of a criticized phenomenon.

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