The Two Nihilisms

The artificial is always a copy of a copy, which should be pushed to the point where it changes its nature and is reversed into the simulacrum (the moment of Pop Art). Artifice and simulation are opposed at the heart of modernity, at the point where modernity settles all its accounts, as two modes of destruction: the two nihilisms. For there is a vast difference between destroying in order to conserve and perpetuate the established order of representations, models, and copies, and destroying the models and copies in order to institute the chaos which creates, making the simulacra function and raising a phantasm - the most innocent of all destructions, the destruction of Platonism." Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense