Art As Far As the Eye Can See

to be an engagement between artist and materials but art has now become technologized. Its materials have become light rather than matter. In the 21st Century the new battleground is art as light versus art as matter. Virilio argues that this change reflects how speed and politics - the defining characteristics of the 20th Century have been transformed in the 21st Century to speed and mass culture. Politics has been replaced with mass culturehellip;and the defining characteristic of mass culture today is cold panic. The same panic which has used terrorism to derail democracy has hijacked the whole art enterprise. This panic is reliant on audio-visual technology to create a new all-seeing, panoptic politics. And the first casualty of this politics is "the art of seeing". Where art used to talk of the aesthetics of disappearance, it must now confront the disappearance of the aesthetic.

PAUL VIRILIO is one of our foremost cultural critics. Architect and urban planner and former director of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris, he has written widely on film, architecture, art, war and technology.