“Emancipation can’t be expected from forms of art that presuppose the imbecility of the viewer while anticipating their precise effect on that viewer: for example, exhibitions that capitalize on the denunciation of the ’society of the spectacle’ or of ‘consumer society’ — bugbears that have already been denounced a hundred times — or those that want to make viewers ‘active’ at all costs with the help of various gadgets borrowed from advertising, a desire predicated on the presupposition that the spectator is otherwise rendered ‘passive’ solely by virtue of his looking. An art is emancipated and emancipating when it renounces the authority of the imposed message, the target audience, and the univocal mode of explicating the world, when, in other words, it stops wanting to emancipate us” (258).
Jacques Ranciére, in conversation with Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Artforum (march 2007)
Les Amants Réguliers* * * * *
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