cover art Pulse / Pink Floyd
			And at the end of the day, art is still art, even when it's media. There's a bigger issue at stake here. Photography - the first fully machine-mediated art form - was a time bomb in the basement of representational painting. Why go on with that always-bogus "fidelity to nature" when a camera can give you real and objective fidelity at the click of a shutter? Baudelaire knew that the camera was the enemy of painting. But he was a 19th-century figure; he didn't know that the camera had an enemy, too. The camera's enemy is the computer. All so-called fidelity melts and warps before the 21st-century scepter of digital imagery, the new usurper that can kill the camera and avenge its grandfather: a paintbrush driven by the human mind and hand. ...Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com) recently wrote Holy Fire , a novel. ------------ Excerpt from: Art And Corruption Bruce Sterling, in Saint Petersburg, on what's really going on in Russia. F E A T U R E | Issue 6.01 - January 1998 Copyright © 1993-97 Wired Magazine Group Inc. http://vip.hotwired.com/wired/6.01/sterling.html