Volume 27, Number 2 © 2013 Smithsonian Institution 2 Summer 2013 How does the world come into view under conditions of mass media? Photomontage, New York (fig. 1), Berenice Abbott’s approximately seven-by-twelve-foot contribution to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers, offers one especially compelling account. 1 Opening on a kaleidoscopic Manhattan through its dozen steel-framed apertures, Photomontage registers the refracted sensorium we habitually equate with modernity, but it also signals the very medium or framework through which we might, for a moment, focus its light. What medium is this, rendering the city in all its complexity available, as if all at once, to vision? e structure ordering Abbott’s pictorial dispersal is nothing other than the “steel girders and plates” skeleton of the then nascent media capital of Rockefeller Center, the same building that would soon serve as central command for RCA, Time Inc., NBC, and so many other mass-media powers whose dismantling of the world into a scatter of images would be, as it had been for Abbott, the first step in the more important work of putting it back together again according to their own vision. 2 By laying the Rockefeller girder work on the surface of her city montage and framing it this way, Abbott materially announced this structure’s—Rockefeller Center’s, the mass media’s—priority in shaping the terms of encounter with the visible world. What Abbott seems to have understood already in 1932, and what increasingly shapes our own understanding of the artistic negotiation with the logic of mass media now, is that the mass media in one move remakes the world through its mediation and supplies the ordering window through which that remade world might be apprehended. With Photomontage, Abbott approached the problem of the mass media not through the artistic representation of its material or otherwise sensible product—what we might call mass culture—but through her own analytical mediation of its institutional forma- tion and descriptive processes. While in its reference to the center of publishing and broadcast media Photomontage suggests a serviceable inventory of the mass media’s more familiar forms—radio, television, periodicals, film—Abbott’s picture troubles less with showing us what mass culture looks like than with showing us instead something of how mass media works, how it organizes the very possibilities of looking. 3 is is also the case for pictures from her later Changing New York series, such as Newspaper Row, Daily News Building, and McGraw-Hill Building, which, in addition to registering the mass media’s concrete architectural manifestations as an integral and transformative part of the city’s topography, raise issues of transparency, power, and the negotiation Jason E. Hill and Elisa Schaar Commentaries Training a Sensibility Notes on American Art and Mass Media