Art and Fear

"Virilio wants to recognize that in video and in film, in TV and on the Internet, Auschwitz inhabits us all as a fundamental if ofetn repressed component of contemporary processes of cultural globalization...In jeopardy of preoccupying itself with virtualized self-absorption, contemporary art, Virilio argues, as well as humanity, has attained such a level of 'self-alienation' that it can now 'experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order'"


"Hypermodern art is for Virilio a manifestation of contemporary aesthetics that aspires to celebrate Nietzschean violence while discounting a crisis of meaning that is so profound that it is fast becoming indistinguishable from what he describes in "A Pitiless Art" as the call to murder and torture..."

- John Armitage, from the Introduction to Paul Virilio's Art and Fear



"At the end of the millennium, what abstraction once tried to pull off is in fact being accomplished before our very eyes: the end of REPRESENTATIVE art and the substitution of a counter-culture of a PRESENTATIVE art. A situation that reinforces the dreadful decline of representative democracy in favour of a democracy based on the rule of opinion, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of virtual democracy, some kind of 'direct democracy' or, more precisely, a presentative multi-media democracy based on automatic polling."

"Today, with excess heaped on excess, desensitization to the shock of images, and the meaninglessness of words has shattered the world stage."

- Paul Virilio, Art and Fear