Recently I saw the 'Seduced by Art' photography and painting show at London's National Gallery. The show opens with Jeff Wall's large 1978 'The Destroyed Room' photograph. Wall is said to use a 'strategy of quotation without direct imitation' and it is implied as a key to reading the whole show. The influence of Delacroix's 1853 painting “The Death of Sardanapalus” is claimed. I'd rather have seen it separate from being told how to look at it. I very much felt that such curatorial guidance was closing off any of my own thought. That is stultification. My own thoughts on seeing this work in reproduction were very different. I did not want to have this framework forced onto my first viewing of the actual print. However I suspect that Wall may have made this claim originally as much as a strategy to have his work shown as Art as something he wished to frame the work with. A basic assumption that I make is that the system must manage the media and state cultural institutions well enough to insure that challenges to its survival do not de-stabilise its grip on power. The way this hegemony is maintained is widely known as Ranciere points out. Gatekeepers or managers, patrons and politicians, all contribute to maintaining a status quo, a class system. At the same time they must provide the system with sufficient criticism to inoculate it. Here, Ranciere's principal theoretical argument is that the position of the spectator in contemporary cultural theory is reliant on the theatrical idea of "the spectacle", a concept the author employs to describe any performance that puts "bodies in action before an assembled audience". For Ranciere, the masses, exposed to what Guy Debord in 1967 called "the society of the spectacle", are usually understood as passive. Consequently, poets, playwrights and theatre directors such as Bertolt Brecht have tried to convert the inert spectator into a committed aesthete and the spectacle into a political presentation.

Does the desire to reduce the distance between the spectator and the art, that has become de rigour, serve only to create that distance? Ranciere argues that it does, by reinforcing or creating "embodied allegories of inequality." p.12. The class basis of this is underlined: "In the past, property owners who lived off their private income were referred to as active citizens, capable of electing and being elected, while those who worked for a living were passive citizens, unworthy of these duties."… "Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting: when we understand (that) the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing, themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection." p.13The Pensiveness of the image is explored in relation to Roland Barthe's Camera Lucida (1982). This seems to be a power of affecting without a train of rational thought. Ranciere sees Barthe's method in short as to: "Set aside the photographers intention, reduce the technical apparatus to a chemical process, and identify the optical relationship with a tactile relationship." p.110. A photograph by Alexander Gardner's of Lewis Paine in handcuffs is used to discuss ways that the photograph displays indeterminacy. Indeterminacy can be the things we are left wondering about, where we begin to project our own thinking into the photo. Pensiveness is the tension between modes of indeterminacy. For him, there is evil in the act of spectating. The spectator is divorced from both the capacity to know and the power to act. Their pleasure is derived from this impotence and ignorance. The spectator should be removed from this position of divorced and detached examination of the spectacle which is being offered on stage. bilgin konumuna geçmek için değil, tercüme sanatını daha iyi uygulayabilmek, tecrübelerini kelimelere dökebilmek ve kelimelerini sınayabilmek; entelektüel maceralarını başkalarının faydalanması için tercüme edebilmek ve onların kendi maceralarını sundukları tercümeleri kendi diline tercüme edebilmek He notices in his archival researches of proletarian writing that the books that are recommended between artisans are not necessarily those engaging with social issues and are more likely to be stories of romantic characters that were not designed by their authors as inspiration for the working class (e.g. Goethe, Chateaubriand, Senancour). These "trigger new passions, which means new forms of balance - or imbalance - between an occupation and the sensory equipment appropriate to it." p.72. So such reading is not providing "rhetorical explanation about what must be done". Rather it provides: Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

What all of these attempts at institutionalization reveal is a surprising truism: that we, the public, are primary to the performatives of event-based art. The “information economy” and the “experience economy” demand no less—but those cynical terms do not determine the outcome of every encounter. The late-’60s moment in which agency and participation began to seem incendiary (pit your body against the machine, make the personal political) is also the epoch in which such strategies entered the safe house of the aesthetic, posing alternate possibilities for experience that remain provocative. Contemporary appeals to the aesthetic of experience, then, always need to be leveraged by our own demands to experiment. We are responsible for our own performativity and for the politics we make of “emancipated” experience. Best to enter these ludic contracts as both knowers and dupes—only then might we really manage to do things with art. If we take Rancière’s statement alluding to equality between image and lived reality, this is where we can further assume a theatrical iteration of this painting. We can shift the focus in the painting from us watching people watching a marriage ceremony, and we can dissolve the surface of the canvas and enter the scene. We can even continue this by imagining the scene expanding into the room in which it is is displayed. It is thus not the chasm between the active and the passive that matters in the present period, but the demise of the difference between reality and its simulation, that gives rise to the inactivity, aesthetic unresponsiveness and political insensitivity of the masses. No longer the spectators that the society of the spectacle needs, the masses' "emancipation", perhaps through theatricalised anti-globalisation street protests, has by now been predicted by a world in which fake pursuits are already integrated into the essentially passive routines of the mass media. Ranciere points out the Left's dream of a community in harmony, as against the goal of a community of dissensus and struggle, is a utopian one. Dissensus here is the inevitable 'conflict' or 'tension' between the essentially different sensory worlds of two or more individuals. This has been forgotten by 'the modernist dream of a community of emancipated human beings' p.60. The 'intertwining of contradictory relations' can itself produce community. "The paradoxical relationship between the 'apart' and the 'together' is also a paradoxical relationship between the present and the future." p.59The Emancipated Spectator is intended to improve our comprehension of art and deepen our grasp of the politics of perception ... [it has an] impressive concern with the political analysis of art and the use of imagery”— Times Higher Education