The Supermarket of Images

by Peter Szendy (Editor), Emmanuel Alloa (Editor), Marta Ponsa (Editor)

The visible world overflows with more than three billion of them stream across social media every day. This overproduction this excess needs to be managed. Images must be stored, formatted and transported, their flow and exchange must be organised. They require road networks (such as internet cables) and new forms of labour (such as content moderators and clickworkers). And they transform the way we see, mobilising our gaze as never before. The essays and artworks in this catalogue, by observing similar transformations currently affecting our financialised economy in the age of cryptocurrencies, seek to grasp and theorise this new iconomy of the visible.




This exhibition catalogue is a collection of short texts providing a wide range of perspectives on the economics of the image and images of the economy. A number of classic essays have also been reproduced, in part or in full. Includes contributions from Emmanuel Alloa, Hervé Aubron, Matthias Bruhn, Yves Citton, Elena Esposito, Jean-Joseph Goux, Maurizio Lazzarato, Catherine Malabou, Marta Ponsa, Marie Rebecchi, Antonio Somaini, Peter Szendy, Leah Temper, Elena Vogman and Dork Zabunyan.

312 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2020

About the author

Peter Szendy is a French philosopher and musicologist. He is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles is a critique of Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening.