The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism.  —Christopher Lasch (1979).  When people today speak of “real life,” what they usually mean is the global media market. And that means: The current protest against the museum is no longer part of a struggle being waged against normative taste in the […]

By the nineteenth century, the badaud — which translates to ‘bystander,’ ‘gawker’ or ‘gawper’ — was recognised as a ubiquitous modern social type.[1] According to the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (1867) ‘the badaud is curious; he is astonished by everything he sees; he believes everything he hears, and he shows his contentment or his surprise […]

The relationship between society and image-production was explored in The Form That Accommodates The Mess, a program of four films curated by OtherFilm in collaboration with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Included were Robin Laurie and Margot Nash’s We Aim to Please (1976), Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder […]