Curated by Margrit Brehm and Roberto Ohrt

“Les Grands Spectacles” is the latest curatorial project to leverage insights from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and the Situationist International for investigating culture and technology in the twentieth century. While the curators have made significant efforts to avoid typical reductionist pitfalls, this show of 320 works remains yet another exhibition that invokes the Situationist project but includes only the usual suspects (like Niki de Saint-Phalle and Yves Klein), some of whom were harshly critiqued by the Situationists. Of the SI, only familiar metonym Debord makes the list. Ohrt, a leading Situationist scholar, faces challenges in rendering a self-conscious view of the culture of technology rather than producing an unintended portrait of the technology of culture.

— Keith Sanborn