The exhibition is named after the seminal text The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (published 1967, first translated into English in 1970), for whom "all that once was directly lived has become mere representation."
'Spectacle' was Guy Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena - advertising, television, film, and celebrity. Thus, Harry Gruyaert's series captures the spectacle of a year of English television, broadcast throughout 1972 on a broken London TV set that transformed all information into lurid, pixelated pop art tableaux.
Photographed twenty-one years late in 1993, Merry Alpern's series captures the spectacle of stockbrokers being themselves entertained by scantily-clad young women, viewed and recorded by the artist through the bathroom window of a lap-dance club in Wall Street, NYC.