Rethinking Spectacle

Rethinking Spectacle, Tate Modern, March 2007, co-organised with Mark Godfrey. (webcast)
This symposium aimed to address 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? Organised to mark the end of Carsten Höller's Test Site (2006) in the Turbine Hall, the symposium sought to question whether this work is really comparable to other forms of mass entertainment. Speakers included: Ina Blom (University of Oslo), Andrea Fraser (UCLA), Frances Morris (Tate Modern), and Sven Lütticken (Free University, Amsterdam).
My lecture was geared towards my undergraduate students at Warwick University, with whom I was producing the research website Rethinking Spectacle (link).