Abstract
My paper will adress the relationship of mass and artistic media, with
particular regard to the critique of cultural institutions. The tension between traditional artistic strategies and “new” communication technologies has been scrutinized in Walter Benjamin’s seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as
early as 1935. In the field of Art, this essay has been taken up in two directions: the surrealist strand as embodied most famously by Marcel Duchamp and his concept of the ‘ready-made’, and in Bertolt Brecht’s development of the “Verfremdungseffekt” (distancing effect). Both of these discourses apply a specific model of critique: while the
former seeks to operate within the ubiquitous presence of mediation and consumerism, the later aims at carving out an autonomus space of resistance. For the post-war artistic and theoretical discussions labelled as “Institional Critique” by influential art historian
Benjamin Buchloh, the Brechtian mode of critique becomes a key reference in grappling with the vast increase of mass media and communication. The art work of Michael Asher, among certain others, negotiates this issue most poignantly. My paper will thus present Asher’s piece from the Benjaminian perspective. By way of conclusion I will allude to the challenges that the most current communication technologies and their societal impacts are positing to the visual arts as to democratic societies at large.

Julia Moritz is an art historian and curator. After graduating from Leipzig University she joined the founding team of European Kunsthalle in Cologne (2005) where she co-published “Question of the Day” (with Nicolaus Schafhausen, 2007). Moritz co-organized the German Pavilion of the 52nd Venice Biennale and was Assistant Curator at Manifesta 7
in Fortezza, Italy (2008). As a Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program in New York she started her dissertation “Institutional Critique in Spaces of Conflict” that was awarded with several research grants and completed in August 2010.
From October onwards Moritz will work at the Institute of Cultural Theory, Research, and the Arts, Lüneburg University. Her exhibition and publication project “Critical Complicity” will open at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, in November 2010.