Lucy Steeds interestingly suggests – with reference to Walter Benjamin's notions of Ausstellbarkeit [fitness, or capacity, for exhibition, or its exhibitionability] and Ausstellungswert [exhibition value] in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” – to analyze art based on its exposability, understood as “its capacity to produce sociopolitical entanglement.”^[1]1Lucy Steeds, “Exposability: On the Taking-Place in Future of Art,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions, eds. Tristan Garcia and Vincent Normand (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), 75-84: 75 (italics in the original). In contrast to most modern works of art, a contemporary work of art is often distributed across different instantiations, elements and appearances. In socially engaged art practices, for example, the events by which the work of art becomes public may be distributed across time and space: social interactions in physical spaces with and without an audience; online and offline texts, films, photos, interviews, and different kinds of documentation that function as an integral part of the work rather than “extra-diegetic” representations of it.^[2]2See Kim West, “Concepts for the Critical Study of Art Exhibitions as Media,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary, eds. Garcia and Normand, 45-55: 48: “the complex of apparatuses in relation to which exhibitionary apparatuses today achieve their definition is the network of digital media, understood in a wide sense: as the matrix of ubiquitous, interconnected devices and platforms, which forms a global infrastructure of shared information standards and ideals, synchronised with the production models of contemporary capitalism, imposing its rhythms and demands on social, cultural, and political life.”

Steeds connects her notion of exposability to the German term Darstellung, which shares its root with Ausstellung in the verb stellen (to place), but which is more oriented toward a taking-place, something that is activated situationally. According to Steeds, the exposing or staging of art implies a shift from display to a process of collective imagination or social action and points to the continued actuality of Benjamin's aesthetic thinking: “Exposability, underscored by Darstellung as much as Ausstellung, insists that art operates in concert with the circumstances in which it is encountered – situationally, historically, and geopolitically. We might say that it proves conscious of the exhibitionary context, of the situation of exposure, so that it both magnifies and is magnified by the particular and transitory here-and-now – operating through the commons temporarily convened, with future chapters in other settings to be experienced and debated distinctly.”^[3]3Steeds, “Exposability,” pp. 82-83. Steeds' points here are made with reference to Walter Benjamin's “What is Epic Theatre?” (1939). The act of showing, displaying, exhibiting and demonstrating something, is an indispensable part of the manifestation of any work of art – contemporary as well as modern – and hence a condition for its being perceived and experienced. This is not yet, however, what makes the thing being shown art or an aesthetic object, be it physical or not. What makes it artistic, or at least aesthetic, is a certain openness with regard to the sense or signification of the thing that appears, which ignites a process of reflexivity that, ultimately, is a negotiation of the world and how we live in it. In other words, there is a decisive difference between exhibition as presentation of an object or phenomenon “as it is” (non-artistic; matter of fact), and exhibition as presentation of an object or phenomenon as an object of reflection that sparks a process of sense-making or a renegotiation of the meaning/sense the object is generally attributed, that is, as a matter of concern. The latter is a socialising image practice (see aesthetic/artistic practice) which creates what Eyal Weizman calls an “open verification” where “[v]erification relates to truth not as a noun or as an essence, but as a practice, one that is contingent, collective, and poly-perspectival.”^[4]4Eyal Weizman, “Open Verification,” Becoming Digital, e-flux Architecture (June 2019), accessed January 28, 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/248062/open-verification/. See also Eyal Weizman (in conversation with Jacob Lund), “Inhabiting the Hyper-Aesthetic Image,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, nos. 61-62 (2021): 230-243, 236ff.

Contemporary artistic practices increasingly destabilise the border between art and non-art in endeavours to address urgent questions about climate change, migration, violence, human rights, decolonization, racism, sexism, etc.^[5]5See for instance Oliver Marchart, “[A]rtistic practices have emerged for which it is more important to be connected to political practices than to art institutions themselves, which in turn, necessarily changes our concept of the public sphere – and of the institution as well.” Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), 144. The destabilisation of the border between art and non-art, between art and political reality, of course, also involves the ways in which these practices are exhibited and our art theoretical notions of “exhibition.” According to Kim West’s reading of Jean Davallon, “an exhibition creates a separate symbolic space, but one featuring ‘real’ objects rather than representations [...] the exhibited objects always retain a connection to their ‘external’ reality, transcending their adherence to the exhibition's symbolic dimension.”^[6]6West, “Concepts for the Critical Study,” 45. West’s observations are based on Jean Davallon’s L’exposition à l'œuvre: Stratégies de communication et médiation symbolique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999), 11. My point is that the double articulation of the objects as real and symbolic through an act of exhibition is a decisive element in making a negotiation of reality possible. The act of exhibition makes something/the work present but, at the same time, it creates a distance, precisely because the appearance of the work has been arranged and addressed to someone/us; what is exhibited is given as having been organised and deliberately made available to appear to us.^[7]7Tristan Garcia, “Neither Gesture nor Work of Art: Exhibition as Disposing for Appearance,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary, eds. Garcia and Normand, 181-194: 183. This distance to the object presented installs a difference and an indeterminacy with regard to its status and meaning/sense. In the language of Jacques Rancière, the object becomes a pensive image in a zone of indeterminacy between passive representation and active operation, between non-art and art.^[8]8Jacques Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 107-132. The creation of such difference and indeterminacy is what allows for a reflexive transformation and questioning of the status quo, of hegemonic, authoritative narratives about the world and what is.

For a while now we have been thinking about exhibitions as that through which (most) art becomes known.^[9]9See Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg et al. (London: Routledge, 1996). According to Bruce W. Ferguson, “exhibitions of art are, by virtue of their visible prominence, structurally intrinsic and perhaps psychologically necessary to any full understanding of most art. Exhibitions can be understood then as the medium of contemporary art in the sense of being its main agency of communication.”^[10]10Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material speech and utter sense,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Greenberg et al., 175-190: 176. In addition, West stresses that exhibitions are the media of art’s public realisation: “as media, art exhibitions should be conceived of as affirmative in their mediating functions. They are the spatial and technical arrangements through which artworks are publicly realized.”^[11]11West, “Concepts for the Critical Study,” 45.