0826473199_Virilio_Fear

Art and Fear
A year later, in 1953, the SITUATIONISTS
would not hesitate to extend this attack by trashing
Charlie Chaplin, pitiful actor par excellence, vilifying
him as a sentimental fraud, mastermind of misery,
even a proto-fascist!
All this verbal delirium seems so oblivious of its
own century and yet condescends to preach to the
rest of the world in the name of freedom of artistic
expression, even during a historical period that
oversaw the setting up of the balance of terror along
with the opening of the laboratories of a science that
was gearing up to programme the end of the world
notably with the invention, in 1951, of thermonuclear
weapons. It corresponds equally to the autodissolution
of the avant-gardes, the end of the grand
illusion of a moderniti savante. You would think it was
not so much impressionism that laid the fo undations
fo r the latter as the nihilism of the calamitous
intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Russia, with
men like Netcha'iev decreeing that one had to 'forge
full steam ahead into the mire' ... And he was not
talking about Turner's Rain, Steam and Sp eed (The
Great Western Railway), the painting that paved the
way fo r Monet's Impressionism.
Inseparable from the suicidal state of representative
democracies, the art of the twentieth century has
never ceased dangerously anticipating or at least
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