Harun Farocki

Just as seventeenth-century paintings portrayed the things of everyday life—food, drink, tableware—as still life, in today’s advertising industry, a great expenditure of money and effort and a high degree of specialization are put into producing photos of goods. The aim is that the various potential interpretations will make it possible for one to project the ideas of art history onto advertising and to notice the differences, and on the other hand, also see such still life pictures in a different light once this strange, cultic expenditure is transferred to the holy act of realizing art. (Harun Farocki)