Keith Sanborn's catalogue essay on Wolfgang Staehle's "Untitled" from 2001:

Untitled

Keith Sanborn

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

  —Walter Benjamin, The Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility

 

Excursus

Wolfgang Staehle’s installation, 2001, ran at Postmaster’s Gallery in New York City from September 4 to October 11; by means of the events of September 11, it seemed to pass from interesting to extraordinary.

Read more