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Paper short abstract

Energy systems are now perceptible through the art system where climate activism targeting artworks reflects a transformed visibility rather than opposition to art. Whereas earlier energy infrastructures were encountered through proximity today’s production is structured by perceptual ambivalence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how contemporary energy systems become perceptible through the art system and argues that recent climate activism targeting museum artworks reflects a transformed regime of visibility rather than opposition to art itself. Whereas earlier energy infrastructures were encountered through proximity and visual resemblance – coal bins, oil derricks, and power plants embedded in everyday life – today’s energy production operates at distance, structured by speed, mobility, and perceptual ambivalence. This shift produces what David Harvey terms an “externality field,” in which energy remains materially central but visually marginal. The paper distinguishes between two aesthetic regimes: resemblance and form. Resemblance organizes perception through likeness and continuity of scale, enabling claims to authenticity through visual replication. Form, by contrast, operates through abstraction, geometry, rhythm, and symbolic transposition, allowing infrastructures to circulate visually without requiring proximity. Drawing on examples from energy advertising, museum spaces, and activist interventions, the paper shows how the art system has become a primary mediator of energy perception. The recent destruction of artworks by climate activists is thus interpreted as an intervention into this regime of form. By targeting artworks – objects designed to concentrate attention and value -activists collapse the distance between refined urban visuality and obscured extractive geographies. These acts do not confuse art with infrastructure but exploit their structural equivalence as surrogate sight objects within an energy mediascape. The paper concludes that the collapse of resemblance into form has become the dominant aesthetic mode through which energy is rendered visible, governable, and contestable.