There exists a rhetoric of art and politics which is only political within the museum or gallery discourse. The starting point for an ethical consideration of the political within arts is to acknowledge the limits of its traditional spaces.
Most of art criticism and teaching pays attention to the question how art exists, and how well it exists. This is to say that the mainstream media reports on art which takes place in familiar spaces and describes each act/object, but takes the placement for granted, and hence also the relationship between the artist/art work and the audiences. The questions of where and to whom, in which space and to which audience, are crucial.
As a political act, the movement from the gallery space to different interface spaces is a potential move toward new audiences and relationships between artworks and users. However, most of current media art is techno-formalist or techno-mythic -- intrafaced rather than interfaced. Hence, the shifts in spatial metaphors can only be starting points for a critical discourse.
CD-ROMs and the world wide web are spaces which offer various possibilities for an artist to reach new audiences. Unfortunately, however, these media are currently being mapped to resemble already existing spaces, power structures, and metaphors. The most interesting art work challenges these traditional mappings which are often manifest in web galleries and museums. In my talk I will refer to artworks which are sites continuously "Under deconstruction."