Introduction to Georg Simmel’s Essay ‘On Art Exhibitions’

Simmel first published ‘On Art Exhibitions’ (‘Ueber Kunstausstellungen’) anonymously in 1890 in the journal Unsere Zeit: Deutsche Revue der Gegenwart (2, 11, pp. 474–80; repr. in Georg-Simmel-Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005, vol. 17, pp. 242–50).

From the outset, no reader of this essay can fail to notice how strikingly its themes anticipate Walter Benjamin’s today much better-known text, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, published almost a half-century later in 1936. Here Benjamin famously wrote of techniques of mechanical reproduction increasing a work of art’s ‘exhibition value’ and displacing its more discreet and mysterious ‘cult value’, related to the ‘aura’ of an original (sections V and VI). The exhibition as institution, and the very idea of the exhibitability of an object, reflected and accompanied the growth of the new reproductive media of photography and film. As a ‘new function’ of experience, Benjamin tells us, the exhibition and ‘exhibition value’ in general made it possible for the first time to view ‘sculptures on medieval cathedrals’ otherwise ‘invisible to the spectator on ground level’, just as oil painting some four centuries previously had begun to confer on images a new function of portability, previously unavailable to the fresco or temple interior. Like the copy or reprint, an exhibition removed an image from its unique spatio-temporal context of origination. Like mechanical reproduction, exhibitions emancipated the work of art from its dependence on ritual, magic and secrecy.

Simmel, similarly, writes of the exhibition as a place in which ‘the most discordant contents sit cheek by jowl in the smallest of spaces’ and in which ‘within minutes, the excitement-hungry mind can travel pleasurably from one pole to another of an entire world of artistic projects and sample the most distantly related varieties of sensibility’. The exhibition was ‘the inevitable extension and outcome of modern specialization’ and ‘patterns of division of labour’. It showed a way in which ‘one-sidedness of modern human beings in the things they produce is offset by multi-sidedness in the things they consume’. Exhibitions gratified ‘a dashing from one impression to the other, an impatience of enjoyment, a fixation on cramming in, in the shortest possible time, as many excitements, interests and pleasures as possible’.

But also – over a decade before ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, of 1903 – Simmel speaks here of the exhibition as testimony to an experience of diverse visual and sensory stimuli impossible for any sane single individual to assimilate smoothly without some mechanism of nervous self-defence. Like a day or week or perhaps lifetime spent in the metropolis, an exhibition’s capacity to shock, surprise and illuminate through contrast and contrariety of exposed images could result in a blunting of this very capacity. Its effect on the spectator could be ‘a blasé attitude’, borne of ‘hyperaesthesia’ and ‘anaesthesia’ – ‘the twin sicknesses of too much sensitivity and too little sensitivity’.

Though speaking initially of notions of decline in modern art with an unmistakable note of irony, Simmel goes on to muse in the middle parts of this essay that what exhibitions reveal in the present is an historic absence of any ‘single great work of art … that consummates and encapsulates all existing achievement and development, like the Sistine Madonna or the Medici tombstones of Michelangelo’. Somewhat like the later doctrinaire Lukács, we see Simmel here to some extent falling back on a Hegelian theme of modern art’s declining ability to conjugate forms and contents in fertile structures of complementarity. Exhibitions in this sense displayed works marked by ‘a tireless desire to extract for the thousandth time the tiniest last drop of originality from events and persons represented’ – in contrast to a way in which ancient Greek and Renaissance Christian art could revisit mythological and biblical themes in ‘any number of elaborations’ that never ‘exhaust their content’.

All the core apprehensions of 20th-century European Kulturkritik subtend Simmel’s essay at this juncture. The sense of the unending spectacle of possibilities, the rise and reign of fashion and consumer taste, transience and subjectivism of value, ever dwindling attention spans, ever mounting thirst for novelty – all these motifs are here. But in the final parts of the text, Simmel nonetheless returns to an essentially affirmative verdict on the art exhibition as an inalienable and irrevocable phenomenon of modern culture. Originality in the present age, he stresses, has ‘passed from the individual to the group’, and an ‘oft-lamented inventive poverty and dearth of strong individual personalities’ had to be seen alongside ‘a greater wealth of undertakings, challenges, styles and genres borne by groups as a whole’. Therefore a world in which art could be traced henceforth only in ‘the collaboration of the many’ working ‘in diverse cooperative functions’ was not per se one to be deplored. Variety of pictures on display afforded spectators ‘a cooler yet clearer vantage-point’, leaving them ‘freer … to stand back from any particular one-sidedness that might otherwise draw the mind uncritically under a work’s spell’.

In numerous ways, Simmel moves on to address these matters elsewhere in ‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’ (1996), ‘The Alpine Journey’ (1895), ‘The Crisis of Culture’ (1916), ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’ (1911) and in the long concluding chapter on the ‘Style of Life’ in The Philosophy of Money (1900). In the more programmatic work of Benjamin, Kracauer, Balázs and the associates of the Institut für Sozialforschung at Frankfurt, all of these themes find much more extended treatment, not long after Simmel’s death in September 1918. But in this essay by Simmel, still a quarter-century before the Great War and the revolutionary ferment of its aftermath, we see the germ of a new concept of inquiry – the spark of a new paradigm of criticism.