With Documenta 15 in our rearview mirror, what seems important at this stage is to understand the connections among the politics of exhibition, organization, and spectatorship. Only then does the significance of its propositions come into focus. These connections are also imbricated in, if not overdetermined by, the charged mediation of Documenta 15, particularly in German-language media. Focusing on spectatorship requires, first of all, that we begin to unpick its plural modes of operation; for example, differentiating, on the one hand, the experience of visiting the exhibition and engaging with the various art projects (on site and online, in short and extended time frames), and, on the other hand, browsing the exhibition on social media. To explore the latter mode of spectatorship is, above all, to consume the discourse about the exhibition, although this difference between spectatorial modalities would be decisive only if access through social media were the sole mode of experiencing the exhibition. I maintain that the moment of spectatorship is key to our understanding of Documenta 15.

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