A Deluge of Simulacra

Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood in order to obtain its full effect.
I think that’s the problem of the mass of today’s creative generation. The reliance on the technique or technology has resulted in a deluge of simulacra which Baudrillard speaks of. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual in nature because art only exists conceptually, but this opening that Duchamp rendered has become a form of exploitation wherein the original conceptualism of Duchamp has been bypassed and replaced by an ignorant aesthetic of post-modernist fashion. The democratisation of technology is a two-edged sword.

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The prevailing messages of the so-called popular media have lost their relevance because a socioeconomic system that substitutes the profit motive for use value separates man from himself and art from life. When we're enslaved to any system, the creative impulse is dulled and the tendency to imitate increases. Thus arises the phenomenon of commercial entertainment distinct from art, a system of temporarily gratifying, without really fulfilling, the experiential needs of an aesthetically impoverished culture. The mass public insists on entertainment over art in order to escape an unnatural way of life in which interior realities are not compatible with exterior realities. Freedom, says Brown, is fusion. Life becomes art when there's no difference between what we are and what we do. Art is a synergetic attempt at closing the gap between what is and what ought to be.

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Source: Adi Newton interviewed for Art Cornwall.