But I thought

1. Pop is an image practice of a third or higher order. According to Plato, real things are already images, namely of ideas. Art, which is traditionally defined as (textual, visual, sonic etc.) imitation of reality, thus represents a special case of an image of an image, comparable to an objective theory or a (photo) documentation.

Neither do ideas exist nor are real things (which also do not exist) their images. Art is not imitation, especially not of reality. (Photo) documentation and theory are also art.

2. Since the early Modern Era, perception in the Western cultural realm has been marked by a quantitative and qualitative repression of images of the first order (“real objects”) by images of the second order (“media objects”). This is a process that is continually advancing, even though its long duration and the breaks in the evolution of media technology often hide it from the individual’s view.

In the Middle Ages, media images were much more important than they are today.

3. Pop posits a point of media saturation, where the pendulum between euphoria and panic has more or less come to rest, where the secondary aspects of the primary and the primary aspects of the secondary seem more present than the primary aspects of the primary and the secondary aspects of the secondary.

The claim that ‘real things’ appear to many people as a television image and vice versa, that what is seen on television appears as immediate reality, is nonsense.

4. When Pop – as an art of surfaces – is only concerned with generating images of images of images from media images of images and then going on to create images of images of images of images etc., then it is dealing less with the specific effects of the tertiary and quartiary than with the crystallization – and thus the long-term eradication – of the “-(i)ary” itself.

Pop is not an art of surfaces. Pop is popular culture.

5. “The Most Beautiful Color Copies from Art Books” marks an attempt to return images of images to the museums from which they were banned and relegated to art books, to confront them there with their own images of images of images on the internet and to present images of the contrasts that arise thereby on the internet, i.e. to keep stretching the media food chain until the aura dragon also devours color copy originals.

Originals are fictions. Aura is a prehistoric apparition.

6. The exhibition is dedicated to the genuflection with which Willy Brandt initiated the new era in East politics during his state visit to Poland in 1970.