Barricades Staged
The Inversion of Theatricality from Art Critique to Political Spectacle
The paper traces the conceptual journey of the term "theatricality," originating in Michael Fried’s 1967 critique of Minimalism, where it functioned as a pejorative label for art that abandoned autonomous representation to acknowledge the viewer and the surrounding environment. Fried’s distinction between "absorption" (the intact fourth wall of self-contained drama) and "theatricality" (the breaking of the wall to address the beholder) established a hierarchy where the former was the ideal and the latter a corruption of artistic integrity. However, contemporary discourse has witnessed a radical inversion of this order: the mechanisms of the art world—specifically the "happening" and the self-conscious performance of Pop Art—have transformed into the primary lens through which all social reality is consumed. Today, legitimate political acts, such as street barricades and civil disobedience, are no longer experienced as autonomous actions but are immediately aestheticized as "theatricality" or melodrama by a public that treats the real world as a stage. This shift, influenced by the performative turn in sociology and the reconceptualization of theatricality as an ontological condition (as argued by Stephen Melville), suggests that the fourth wall has been dissolved entirely; the distinction between representation and publicity stunt has collapsed, leaving political action vulnerable to neutralization as mere spectacle. The position of the writer is that the pejorative force of "theatricality" has migrated from the artwork to the observer, where the act of consuming a political event as a performance erases its genuine political agency, transforming the barricade from a site of resistance into a consumable drama.