Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/34566

In this paper I try to make a clear difference between the mass media’s attitude toward images (which I call ‘spectacle’ in accordance with Guy Debord) and that of artists. In the highly information-oriented society of today the ‘spectacle’ influences people so deeply that we tend to take that attitude when we treat arts, which damages transmission of its essence. The main difference between the two attitudes consists in how they treat the moral context of the images. For artists the appearance of images, their effects or beauty are never depicted for their own sake. The effect or the beauty only comes after as the results or mere byproducts of his or her quest for a new reality. The quest is what matters. And it has a moral nature: the artist tries to discover something valuable to him or her and to other people. If the artist directly chooses effective or beautiful images without this quest, he can only produce ‘kitsch’ in the sense of Hermann Broch. For the mass media, only the fixed appearance of the image matters. And the media often refers to images ignoring their moral context, using them for different, often spectacular purposes which often contradict their originally moral contexts. In that way the mass media transforms every great art work into kitsch as it separates its appearance from its original moral contexts. An art gallery should be a countervailing power against this prevailing trend. And I examined the form of gallery which emphasizes the moral context of art works.