This symposium addresses 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? Are The Unilever Series commissions such as Carsten Höller’s Test Site really comparable to other forms of mass entertainment?
