Nineteenth-century European urban life systematically arranged itself as exhibitions representing an absent reality

Evidence

The technique of representation was not limited to the world exhibitions. Outside the exhibitions visitors to Europe encountered further mechanisms of representation. In museums and Orientalist congresses, the theatre and the zoo, schools and department stores, the very streets of the modern city with their meaningful facades, they found the method of meaning to be the same. Everything seemed to be set up before the observer as a picture or exhibition of something, representing some reality beyond. The visitor to Europe encountered not just exhibitions of the world, but the world itself ordered up as though it were an endless exhibition. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 36

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Debord’s spectacle and Berger’s Ways of Seeing on how display flattens reality into image.