Description
The Accident of Art by Paul Virilio, ISBN-13: 978-1584350200
[PDF eBook eTextbook]
- Publisher: Semiotext(e)
- Language: English
- 120 pages
- ISBN-10: 9781584350200
- ISBN-13: 978-1584350200
There is a catastrophe within contemporary art. What I call the “optically correct” is at stake. The vision machine and the motor have triggered it, but the visual arts haven’t learned from it. Instead, they’ve masked this failure with commercial success. This “accident” is provoking a reversal of values. In my view, this is positive: the accident reveals something important we would not otherwise know how to perceive.—Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art
Urbanist and technological theorist Paul Virilio trained as a painter, studying under Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Bazaine and de Stael. In The Accident of Art, his third extended conversation with Sylvère Lotringer, Virilio addresses the situation of art within technological society for the first time. This book completes a collaborative trilogy the two began in 1982 with Pure War and continued with Crepuscular Dawn, their 2002 work on architecture and biotechnology. In The Accident of Art, Virilio and Lotringer argue that a direct relation exists between war trauma and art. Why has art failed to reinvent itself in the face of technology, unlike performing art? Why has art simply retreated into painting, or surrendered to digital technology? Accidents, Virilio claims, can free us from speed’s inertia. As technological catastrophes, accidents are inventions in their own right.
Paul Virilio was born in 1932 and has published a wide range of books, essays, and interviews grappling with the question of speed and technology, including Pure War, Speed and Politics, Lost Dimension, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, and The Accident of Art, all published by Semiotext(e).
Sylvère Lotringer is Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School, Switzerland, and Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University.
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