Les Grands Spectacles: 120 Years of Art and Mass Culture is the title of an exhibition that was held at the Museum of Modern Art Salzburg in 2005 as well as of the extensively illustrated accompanying catalogue. According to this review by Julia Pine in the Journal of Visual Culture (2006, Volume 5, No. 3 ) the catalogue contains 15 essays, all published in both English and German, by the curators of the show, Margrit Brehm, an associate curator of the museum, and Roberto Ohrt, a freelance writer on the arts, and a specialist on the Situationists.

According to the curators:

The aim of the exhibition is to examine the relationship between art and spectacle; to inquire about the significance of art in a culture that s increasingly geared to sensations, illusions, spotlights and cameras;to ask which current artistic strategies are responding to this; to sketch out a historical panorama extending back to the 19th century in order to examine the different kinds of public space and media, ideas and fictions over the last 120 years. (p. 27)

This is articulated by Margrit Brehm in an essay entitled ‘The Age of Pigs’:

The borderline between high and low began to blur when images reproduced in the media – indicators of mass culture and consumerism – found their way onto the canvas. Reality was traded, spectacular situations staged in real time, and the remnants of industrial society were integrated into art’s store of materials. Assemblage, environment, body art, performance and action were means of artistic expression that mirrored the changed idiom and demanded a new form of reception from the viewer. (p. 219)