The fashionable French thinker of the decade and reigning high priest of media theory, Jean Baudrillard has taken a sizable segment of the art world by storm, and the list of artists who cite him as a central influence is long indeed (Haim Steinbach, Bruce and Norman Yonomoto, Meyer Vaisman, Jeff Koons, Peter Nagy, Robert Longo, to name a few).
Espousing a line of thought that begins with Baudelaire, reaches critical mass with Warhol and borrows heavily from Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, Baudrillard isn't a particularly original thinker. He's filched more than a few bits from his fellow French theorists Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Paul Verdier, and Jean Francois Lyotard, in fact. Nor are his ideas--your basic Marxist post-structuralism--remotely revolutionary at this point.
