Succumbing to Spectacle

There is no question that “Jenny Holzer: Light Line,” currently at the Guggenheim, is a spectacle. Holzer’s LED display, with her signature cryptic and not-so-cryptic sentences and sentence fragments snaking up the museum’s ramp, turns the monumental rotunda that Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than sixty-five years ago into an advertisement for herself. The exhibition, which is described as a “reimagination” of an installation Holzer made at the Guggenheim in 1989, combines pseudophilosophy, wise-guy polemic, and aimless chatter in one gigantic post-Duchampian attention grabber.

Although it’s difficult to know what museumgoers are thinking, my impression when I visited the Guggenheim on a weekday afternoon was that they weren’t having it. People looked nonplussed as they wandered up and down the ramp, reading combinations of words ranging from the romantic or erotic (“I WAIT FOR YOU,” “I TICKLE YOU”) to the political (“PEOPLE WHO DON’T WORK WITH THEIR HANDS ARE PARASITES”). Aside from the verbiage, there’s nothing much to engage you. Roughly half of the bays along the ramp are empty. The rest contain more of Holzer’s wordy stuff, sometimes inscribed on metal panels or marble sarcophagi. For one series she borrowed tweets from Donald Trump. In recent years she’s done what are being referred to as paintings, which offer more stuff to read, some of it derived from official government documents. Compared with what Holzer has to say, Gertrude Stein’s “Pigeons on the grass alas” is biblical.

I wouldn’t even mention “Light Line” except that Holzer’s spectacle happened to take over the Guggenheim as I was beginning to think about a fascination with the idea of spectacle that for decades has preoccupied arts professionals ranging from curators to historians. Much of the most highly regarded art of the past generation is engineered for spectacle, to envelop and overwhelm us. I’m thinking of works as different as Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses,” James Turrell’s light experiments, Anselm Kiefer’s impastoed canvases, Andreas Gursky’s mural-size photographs, and Jeff Koons’s remakes of ordinary objects ranging from blow-up toys to a pile of Play-Doh. In many museums and galleries gigantism has become an inevitability, apparently the only way left, in a consumer society, to convince anyone of the power of art. According to Benjamin Buchloh, a widely admired art historian who has chronicled developments in the past several decades, even some of the artists who set out to confront this gigantism “finally succumb to the powers of spectacle culture to permeate all conventions of perception and communication without any form of resistance whatsoever.” A less ideologically driven critic, the late Peter Schjeldahl, reflected that “the present Mammon-driven era in contemporary art [is] the Koons Age” when he wrote about the enormous Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2014. Schjeldahl concluded, “If you don’t like that, take it up with the world.” According to this logic, an artistic spectacle isn’t something you choose. It’s a fact, like it or not.

I’m not against spectacle. The ornery power of Serra’s immense steel pieces has everything to do with their tyrannical dimensions. The best of Turrell’s installations couldn’t work their magic if they weren’t wraparound experiences. The appetite for spectacle is very old—the earliest citation of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is from around 1340—and there are many visual masterworks that overwhelm us in such a way that discernment and discrimination, at least initially, are beside the point. This is certainly true of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Roman church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, and Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, where the pull of a great artist’s response to the Spanish Civil War makes for crowds packed so tight that it’s difficult to get close enough to really see the painting. Monumentality has its place in the arts. But we also crave other experiences. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find museums and galleries where you feel encouraged to have more intimate, contemplative, perhaps open-ended responses.

A few artists who emphasize the close-up encounter have been widely exhibited in recent years, both in the US and internationally. One is Vija Celmins, with her microscopic attentiveness to the world around us. Another is Robert Gober, a master of the uncanny. But the drift toward spectacle seems unstoppable. This helps to explain why Holzer’s installation has appeared at the Guggenheim not once but twice, while artists of her generation who have long been admired in the art world but whose work provokes different kinds of expectations and experiences have not had that honor. If spectacle were not so often the focus, I believe that a larger segment of the public would have had more opportunities over the past thirty years to see Joan Snyder’s expressionist nature abstractions, Bill Jensen’s darkly fierce dreamscapes, and Stanley Lewis’s precise but perfervid studies of small-town streets and backyards. A retrospective of Lewis’s work, which was at the Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, over the summer, would be unlikely to find a place in a museum in any of our major cities.

When spectacle is discussed by critics, curators, and historians, there is generally, whether explicitly or not, a reference to Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Debord uses the word “spectacle” in a particular way, to describe the development of capitalist culture in the past couple of hundred years as a totalizing experience and the public as helpless to do anything but submit. While art historians have often related Debord’s concepts to nineteenth-century culture, when he was writing in the 1960s he was definitely focused on the present. “The spectacle,” Debord writes, “is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”—this “image,” as one translator interprets it, being “a substitute for reality itself.” He sees the society of the spectacle as an overload of sensory and psychological experience, which includes the lights, sounds, and images that blanket cities and suburbs, the explosion of goods in shops, department stores, and malls, and the rapid-fire development of electronic means of communication. Debord makes a distinction between communal life in earlier periods, which may have reflected shared religious or social values or ideals, and the capitalist spectacle, which is imposed on the public. Although he rejects the hierarchical societies of previous centuries, he worries that “once society has lost the community that myth was formerly able to ensure, it must inevitably lose all the reference points of a truly common language.” He has a soft spot for “the exuberant life of the Italian cities” of the Renaissance, where people enjoyed “the passing of time,” although “this enjoyment of transience would turn out to be transient.”

The capitalist spectacle, as understood by Debord and those who take an interest in his work, is a phenomenon that denies individuals the freedom to respond to experiences—and can make it difficult to create works of art that fully reflect their experiences. While there may be a vein of truth in the critique of bourgeois society that Debord developed along with his cohort in the Situationist International, a group of Marxist intellectuals and activists immensely influential in France in the 1960s, even sympathetic observers can find it challenging to explicate, much less respond to, a theory so intricate and abstract. The society of the spectacle, we are told, has octopus tentacles. Among many other things, the spectacle undermines the artist’s ability to act forcefully or convincingly. “Art’s declaration of independence,” Debord explains, is “the beginning of the end of art.” What he describes as “the individual production of separate works”—the work of the modern artist—cannot be sustained. The lyric, contemplative, or philosophical artist is programmed for failure. The grandiosity of Debord’s ideas is part of their appeal. His rhetoric—a Frenchified Marxism—can have a narcotic effect on artists and intellectuals, who find themselves seeing a spectacle of one kind or another wherever they turn.

It’s no wonder that many of Debord’s admirers have come to the conclusion that the only way to combat a spectacle is with a different kind of spectacle. His admirers tend to be sentimental about what they regard as the carnivalesque social gatherings of the Middle Ages and earlier epochs and the egalitarian festivals of the first years after the Russian Revolution. What they’re looking for now is a spectacle that celebrates a preferred social or political vantage point or somehow engages the audience in ways that are seen as participatory rather than controlling, a counterspectacle or antispectacle spectacle. This may be what Jenny Holzer set out to create with “Light Line.”

Art historians, even the most discriminating, sometimes leave me feeling that they regard the spectacle as the be all and end all. A case in point is Jonathan Crary, the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia. In a widely discussed book, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999), this agile writer presents Georges Seurat as an artist engaged in a complex and dramatic confrontation with the society of the spectacle.

I’m interested in Crary’s admiration for Seurat’s Parade de cirque (1887–1888), a modest-size masterwork in which a few people, out and about on a Parisian evening, watch a little musical performance and consider paying the price of admission to a circus. What I don’t understand is how Crary, writing about a painting of such delicate and decisive enchantment, can imagine that he’s looking at “a figuration of a social territory where techniques of fascination and attraction, of appearance and semblance, have the capacity to overpower an observer or audience, even as a psychological regression.” Taken sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, there’s an intellectual dazzle to Crary’s strenuous explorations of connections between Seurat’s painting and the thinking of Nietzsche, Wagner, William James, and a number of nineteenth-century researchers and writers who were developing new ideas about human perception and psychology. But what all of this ultimately amounts to—it goes on for 130 pages—is a feat of erudite showmanship that overwhelms Seurat. Crary, strangely enough, is approaching Seurat in some of the same ways that he believes Seurat approaches the members of the audience in Parade de cirque: “They stand here as potential objects of techniques for the control and management of perception and attention.” For Crary artistic autonomy is as tenuous as human freedom. The melancholy beauty of Parade de cirque, familiar to anybody who’s experienced a great city after dark, involves “the relentless unmasking of the absence and vacancy of appearance within a reified, quantifiable world”—a spectacle, in other words, that denies men and women their independence and agency.

Crary has just collected some four decades of essays in Tricks of the Light, which again has a subtitle that refers to Debord: Essays on Art and Spectacle. The work here ranges from reviews written for art magazines in the 1970s to more recent essays that focus on movies (Blade Runner, Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma) and a video found on YouTube of the Soviets detonating an enormous hydrogen bomb at a test site on an island above the Arctic Circle. I’m left with the impression that Crary believes artists have no alternative but to succumb, in one way or another, to the social and cultural imperatives of their time.

In an essay entitled “Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison,” Crary reproduces one of Cézanne’s late landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire and announces that “for Cézanne and for the emerging industries of the spectacle, a stable referential model of perception is no longer effective or useful.” Crary aligns himself with Cézanne’s earlier admirers when he explains that the artist created a space “filled with forces, events, and intensities rather than objects.” But he won’t leave it at that. Part of what interests him about Cézanne’s “malleable and tractable visual space” is that this kind of space “would become subject to endless forms of external restructuring, manipulation, and colonization throughout the twentieth century.” What’s lost in Crary’s argument is the genealogy of Cézanne’s experiments with incoherence, which are part of a search for new forms of coherence that goes back at least as far as Titian. Of course Crary, who knows how to cover his bases, wouldn’t deny Cézanne’s precursors. In writing about Seurat in Suspensions of Attention he acknowledges that some two hundred years before Seurat and Cézanne, in the work of Rembrandt and Velázquez, both strongly influenced by Titian, you find that “the surface coalesces into a shimmering image of a recognizable world.” What troubles me is Crary’s tendency to push late-nineteenth century artists into a dialogue, debate, or competition with the society of the spectacle. I don’t buy it.

Crary finds time, in the same essay in which he takes on late Cézanne, to discuss Thomas Edison’s early phonographs and Fritz Lang’s interest, in Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1927), in “the rhythmic attractions of the roulette wheel and the shifting quotes on the wall of the stock exchange.” His exploration of the work of Manet, Seurat, and Cézanne in Suspensions of Perception somehow leads him not only to Edison’s stock ticker apparatus and Kinetoscope but also to a telephonic listening room at the Exposition Internationale d’Électricité in Paris in 1881, the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin in the 1880s, as well as a stereoscope, a Praxinoscope, a phenakistoscope, a tachistoscope, and other precinematic or early cinematic experiments. Whatever the relevance of these admittedly interesting gadgets to his thesis, my feeling is that Crary, as he investigates various once new and now antiquated technologies, is beguiled and maybe even infatuated by the inventions that he believes constrain or determine human experience. Like many intellectuals who expatiate on the dangers of the society of the spectacle, he ends up fetishizing the very thing he sets out to critique.

In an essay in Tricks of the Light on the artist Cerith Wyn Evans, Crary worries about “a global present in which millions become ever more drawn and captive, like moths, to the seductive flickerings of the glowing screens, monitors, and displays that illumine our 24/7 day/night world.” While these are certainly concerns that many of us share, Crary can’t seem to tear himself away from the spectacle long enough to regard a Cézanne or a Seurat as a development in the history of painting rather than the history of spectacle. Crary’s isn’t an entirely pessimistic view. At the end of Suspensions of Perception he argues that

spectacular society is not irrevocably destined to become a seamless regime of separation or an ominous collective mobilization; instead it will be a patchwork of fluctuating effects in which individuals and groups continually reconstitute themselves—either creatively or reactively.

What he rejects is the possibility that a genius can sometimes operate outside of all social and political considerations and constraints. Crary would probably dismiss such an idea as a bourgeois (or neoconservative) delusion.

Nothing about the spectacle of modern life has interested art historians more than the early years of the Russian Revolution, when avant-garde artists became involved with various civic projects. Some historians believe that at least for a time the Bolsheviks supported this radical reimagining of public life. The old capitalist society of the spectacle was going to expire, replaced by a modern spectacle that artists and audiences dreamed up together. These developments, a topic of discussion in scholarly circles since at least the 1960s, have been explored in a number of important museum exhibitions, ranging from “Transform the world! Poetry must be made by all!,” mounted at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1969 and strongly influenced by Debord and the Situationists, through “Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia!: Soviet Art Put to the Test,” at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017–2018 and the somewhat more ideologically restrained “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918–1939,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2020–2021.

Ronald Hunt, the curator of the Moderna Museet show, was an English art historian with an interest in Marxist thought. In the introduction to the catalog he explained that both the Russian avant-garde and the French Surrealists, also featured in the exhibition, “had only scorn for bourgeois capitalism and its achievement.” Hunt, however, believed that avant-garde art, perhaps almost despite itself, was fully integrated into the capitalist society of the spectacle. He regarded avant-gardism “as mere packaging of an outworn commodity. It functions too readily as part of the media, part of the ‘spectacle’ that serves as a substitute for our own lives.” From what I can gather from the catalog and photographs of the installation, the show was short on original works and more pedagogical than visual, but that was in line with the organizers’ skepticism about the place of art in society. According to Hunt, Pontus Hultén, the director of the museum at the time, saw the gallery as “a space for people to gather and discuss revolutionary ideas”; the Black Panthers, then in exile in Sweden, were invited to take part.

The Moderna Museet catalog includes passages from a book by Nina Gourfinkel, Le Théâtre russe contemporain, published in Paris in 1931, in which the new Soviet festivals are compared with older social forms. “The term ‘spectacles,’” Gourfinkel explained, couldn’t be applied to what was happening in Russia: “It was necessary to abolish all that was mere spectacle, the spectator abandoning his habitual passivity was to become the participant.” Of course the surviving evidence for these manifestations is fragmentary at best—blurred photographs of trains, boats, and public squares decorated in ways that sometimes had little to do with the antinaturalistic visual language that interested the Russian avant-garde.

I will never forget my astonishment, on walking into “Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia!” at the Art Institute of Chicago, to find a gathering of posters, pamphlets, photographs, and other material emblazoned with Lenin’s image, a sort of shrine to the leader that the curators perhaps imagined was the right kind of spectacle. Faced with the fact that at some point in the 1920s the Bolsheviks turned on the avant-garde, the curators at the Art Institute, Devin Fore and Matthew Witkovsky, decided to scramble the chronology of increasing totalitarian terror, preferring to focus more generally on what they referred to as art’s “metabolic exchange with the people and spaces around it.” In 1926, when the Bolsheviks were already on their way to eliminating the avant-garde, a writer named A.A. Gvozdev—I quote from a catalog essay by Kristin Romberg titled “Festival”—explained that

it was in the mass festivals that the rift [between art and] the popular masses was overcome, the rift that defined art in bourgeois society as aristocratic…. In the festivals…we first glimpsed the authentic, undistorted character of the masses.

Writing about the tangled relationship between the Russian avant-garde and the early Bolshevik festivals in which they had a hand, Romberg emphasizes how little was actually in the artists’ control. She reproduces a photograph by the avant-garde artist Aleksandr Rodchenko entitled Greetings to Stalin (1932), with a large mass of citizens carrying banners, one of which gives a shout-out to the leader. She points out that what initially looks like a coherent show of support for the Stalinist regime on closer inspection “dissolves in the details of the pedestrian crowd, which does not march but mills about, its movement undisciplined and multidirectional.” Romberg’s intricate analysis of Rodchenko’s photograph—and the use of related photographs in graphic designs by other avant-garde artists—suggests that efforts to “expand the great Soviet ‘we,’” far from giving birth to a new kind of festival, often found the avant-garde involved with spectacles more routinized (and repressive) than anything a city dweller had experienced in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Paris that has been the focus of so much discussion about the society of the spectacle.

In the Chicago catalog Anatoly Lunacharsky, a Bolshevik official who exerted extraordinary influence over developments in the arts in the early years of the Soviet Union, is quoted as declaring that “the masses…are their own spectacle” and “the whole people demonstrate their own spirit for themselves.” While these remarks are cited as evidence of the early Bolsheviks’ support of the avant-garde—I suppose in some sense it’s true—Sjeng Scheijen’s The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1917–1935 takes a darker view of Lunacharsky’s relationship with the new art, arguing that it was never more than halfhearted. Scheijen has had a variegated career—his previous book was a biography of Diaghilev—and I fear that his close-knit account of the makers and shapers of the Russian avant-garde will be overlooked by some art historians, despite what appears to be his firm grasp of the Russian language and sources. Scholars will surely dispute some of his use of evidence that is by any measure difficult to interpret, but in cutting through the retrospective romance that has clouded so many accounts of those years, Scheijen makes it more clear than ever before that the avant-garde’s relationship with Bolshevism was at best shaky long before Stalin’s program of annihilation was fully underway.

The story Scheijen tells is full of frustrations, dashed hopes, and disasters. He explains that as Vladimir Tatlin, a commanding figure in the Russian avant-garde, oversaw the construction of monuments for the celebrations of the Bolshevik triumph in 1918, he found himself going along with what were almost without exception realistic portrayals of revolutionary heroes that had nothing to do with his own artistic ideas. The lone exception, Boris Korolyov’s Cubist Monument to Bakunin, was declared a “betrayal” by Lenin and survived only until 1920. “Lenin,” Scheijen writes,

had informed Lunacharsky that he was concerned about the proper depiction of Marx’s beard, and it was Lunacharsky’s job to “impress upon” the artists that the hair “should resemble the real thing, so that people get an impression of Karl Marx that is comparable to his portraits.”

Scheijen goes on to say that “Tatlin could harbour no illusions whatsoever.” Today Tatlin is remembered for the adventuresome architecture of his Monument to the Third International (1919–1920), but that magnificent invention never got beyond the planning stages; what remains are photographs of a scale model, written descriptions, and a drawing or two. Well before Lenin’s death in 1924, the avant-garde, despite some successes, was facing eclipse.

Whatever old photographs may suggest about the public’s engagement with the more innovative displays erected to celebrate the revolution, Scheijen cites popular responses in the newspapers to futurist decorations in Moscow in February 1919 that make clear the extent to which the public wasn’t on board with the avant-garde. “The sacred blood that was spilled for the socialist revolution is being desecrated by a malevolent, slanderous orgy,” one Soviet citizen wrote to a newspaper:

See the soldiers of the Red Army clothed in ridiculous colorful robes, and the workers with their sawn-off, triangular faces. What counter-revolutionary could make a more pernicious mockery of the workers’ revolution?

So much for the myth of the public’s enthusiastic embrace of the avant-garde festivities that were engineered to replace the society of the spectacle.

I don’t think it’s incidental that during the last half-century, when art historians and museum curators have been increasingly absorbed with the idea of the society of the spectacle—and how to embrace it, critique it, or co-opt it—there has been a phenomenal growth in the popularity of art museums and galleries. This began in the 1960s, when an exploding middle class began traveling internationally and public interest in the arts was supercharged by widely reported events such as the purchase of a Rembrandt by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $2.3 million. While smaller arts institutions may be struggling today, the big museums, blockbuster exhibitions, art fairs, auction houses, and blue-chip galleries have become engines for tourism and economic growth. What’s going on in all these places is widely—sometimes it seems obsessively—reported in the media.

Anyone looking at the contemporary art world can’t help but think about spectacle, whether in Debord’s sense or some more general way. The end of the Covid-19 lockdown and the concomitant uptick in travel has only intensified these developments. People wait in what seem like longer and longer lines to visit museums in New York, London, Paris, and many other cities, and once they’re inside the crush becomes part of the experience of Renaissance masterworks at the Louvre or the holograms included in the “multisensory” experience of “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Museum of Modern Art, the Hyundai Card Digital Wall, a huge screen on the main floor displaying “emerging technologies by contemporary artists,” has become a focal point, with museumgoers filling the space to what sometimes seems like capacity. Rafik Anadol’s Unsupervised, with what we are told are bits and pieces of data about the museum’s collection transformed by “a sophisticated machine-learning model” into mutating abstract configurations—it’s Disneyland Surrealism—had a yearlong run at MoMA beginning in November 2022; it has been followed by Leslie Thornton’s HANDMADE.

Museum officials involved with new construction in the past several decades—such as Tate Modern in London or the Whitney in New York—have tended to favor oversize spaces that inevitably dwarf works of a more modest size or scale. And the major commercial galleries, which are more and more pushing midlevel galleries out of business in New York, are constructing spaces that often make intimacy impossible. We’re at a point when traditional museums find themselves competing with the popularity of events such as “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” This wraparound environment, created by projecting the artist’s work on walls and floors, has toured the United States and Europe since 2017, reportedly attracting more than five million visitors. My impression is that art historians, critics, and curators who have grappled with the question of spectacle are fascinated by—and also uneasy with—what they see going on all around them.

Even Holzer, although she apparently has no qualms about making a spectacle of herself at the Guggenheim, has reservations. Some years ago, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she was interviewed by Buchloh and sounded concerned when he suggested that she might be creating some sort of spectacle. He wondered if her work, with its “technologically complex and visually seductive innovations,” paid tribute to

an increasingly spectacularized public sphere, where a technological mediation in addition to an intense apparatus of visual seduction would be necessary to aspire to any communication at all—if communication still was possible.

Holzer, wanting to push back, observed that “I don’t know that I paid tribute to the spectacular.” She admitted that “‘spectacular’ has become a dirty word, perhaps rightly.” When pressed as to whether her work participated “in these historical processes of the spectacularization of the public sphere,” she had to confess: “I’ve participated in a few spectacles in museums.” No kidding.

Holzer was expressing something like embarrassment or discomfort—it’s difficult to say—as she conversed with Buchloh about the relationship between the artist and the wider world. Their exchange, focused for a time on art and spectacle, was part of a larger discussion about the place of culture in a democratic society that’s been going on for more than a hundred years. There always seem to be more questions than answers as artists and intellectuals twist themselves into all kinds of uncomfortable positions, attempting to align themselves with a public that they don’t really know and probably don’t really like. In thinking about all of this, especially in relation to Holzer, I’ve found myself looking back to Dwight Macdonald’s long essay “Masscult and Midcult” (1960), at least in part because Macdonald’s definition of midcult, a bastardized art that imitates high culture while attracting a mass audience, seems to perfectly describe Holzer’s word salad as it creeps up the rotunda of the Guggenheim. Macdonald’s observation that midcult “exploits the discoveries of the avant-garde” and uses them “in the service of the banal” can easily double as a description of what Holzer has been up to for decades now.

But I have second thoughts, not about Holzer but about Macdonald’s thesis. I find myself wondering if the effort to fit Holzer or any other artist into some sociological scheme, even one as brilliant as Macdonald’s, plays into the hands of artists and intellectuals who can’t see art as anything but a cultural phenomenon. In “Masscult and Midcult” Macdonald observed that “the very nature of mass industry and of its offshoot, Masscult, made a pluralistic culture impossible.” We can all understand how he reached this conclusion. But like so many writers who develop theories about art and society, whether affiliated with the left or the right, Macdonald approached the question not from the point of view of the artists and their admirers but from the point of view of a society that is thought to crush whatever it cannot absorb. True, Macdonald ended his essay with a call for a “new public for High Culture” that “begins to show some esprit de corps,” but given the general drift of his argument even high culture can seem to become a kind of spectacle, albeit a better one.

What gets lost in much of the discussion about the relationship between art, artists, and society is that a spectacle is only one kind of human experience, one imaginative possibility among others. By associating certain kinds of artistic experiences with certain audiences we run the risk of forcing artists and audiences into predetermined groups, when what I think we really want to do in a democratic society is open up the groups, improve communication between individuals. (Macdonald gestures in this direction, but somewhat obliquely.) Artists are capable of many different things, which of course doesn’t necessarily mean that all artistic expressions have always been available to all kinds of audiences. The architects, artists, and artisans of medieval Europe produced cathedrals of monumental proportions and illuminated manuscripts that fit the monumental into the miniature. The cathedrals were for the many and the manuscripts were for the few, but if anyone wonders whether an illuminated manuscript can appeal to a large audience, the answer is right before our eyes in the museumgoers who spend time in the galleries of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where those manuscripts are generally on display.

Artists have always been attuned to the large and the small as dimensions of human experience. And audiences have always had the potential to respond to different experiences in different ways. The trouble with Jenny Holzer is that she’s projecting flyspeck thoughts on a gigantic scale. The problem isn’t with the idea of a spectacle but with her inability to go beyond the spectacle as the “self-congratulatory monologue” that Guy Debord was warning about back in 1967.