The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the                  World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic                  laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli                  wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As                  virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of                  the war.In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to                  art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back                  endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far                  from lamenting the "end of art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within                  the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial                  frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.Conceived and edited                  by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylv?re Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art                  presents Baudrillard's writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics,                  economics, and media. Culminating with "War Porn," a scathing analysis of the                  spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book                  folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.

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