In 2004 Editions Galilée published Le Pacte de Lucidité ou l'Intelligence du Mal, a familiar ‘late’ Baudrillardian tract. In 2005 Berg published Chris Turner's English translation as The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact with a contextualised summation of Baudrillard's life and work by the translator published as the introduction to the English edition. The book encapsulates many of the themes Baudrillard had been writing about since the mid 1980s and is as good an example of his ‘theory-fiction’ writing style as any of his books. The unreferenced name checks are familiar (McLuhan, Nietzsche, Borges) but the ‘shadow’ of 9/11 falls everywhere. It is demonstrably a post 2001 book. The extract here is a representative piece from the book. In 2003 Baudrillard gave a lecture entitled ‘Art Contemporary with Itself’ at the Venice Biennale in Italy. The majority of this lecture (minus the ending which comprised two disembodied quotations from Saul Bellow and Guido Ceronetti) is the text extracted here. It appeared in full in written-up form as the chapter entitled ‘Contemporary Art’ in the book. The subject is modern, or contemporary, art. By the early years of the 2000s Baudrillard's spat with the art world had to some extent been forgotten but Baudrillard reignites it here, mentioning the art conspiracy which he had written about in the mid 1990s. He begins by declaiming that ‘the adventure of modern art is over’ and continues with the observation that the art market is the modern charnel house of culture, hardly endearing himself to his former art world supporters.