Rethinking Spectacle

This symposium addresses recent claims that contemporary art is 'spectacularised' and increasingly inseparable from the marketing of large-scale museums. But what do we really mean by 'spectacle' today? And how useful are Guy Debord's ideas (Society of the Spectacle, 1967) for analysing new conditions of the display of contemporary art? Are The Unilever Series commissions such as Carsten Höller's Test Site really comparable to other forms of mass entertainment?

Art historian Ina Blom (University of Oslo), artist Andrea Fraser (UCLA), Tate curator Frances Morris, and art critics Claire Bishop (University of Warwick) and Mark Godfrey (Slade School of Fine Art) examine whether the denigration of art as 'spectacle' masks an elitist resistance to populism, or if it contains a more serious critique of the global market and the role of art within this. The panel discussion is chaired by Sven Lütticken.

Supported by The Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research, University of Warwick