The article is dedicated to the penetration of the documentary genre into the space of modern art. The author addresses this topic through the spectacle of relations between ethics and aesthetics, politics and poetics. Okwui emphasizes fundamental changes in society, where the relations between different politicians and cultural figures are no longer defined by class struggle, but concentrate rather on human rights. The author demonstrates how the norms of biopolitics became established in the domain of contemporary art, where the key issues become the search for the meaning of life, and ethical and legal immunity of a man in the frame of global economic and political changes in the world system. This is "biopolitics," the transformation of ethics into an important criterion of our relations with the world, defining the documentary genre as a new method of creative interpretation of reality. The article is based on an analysis of the exhibition Documenta 11, curated by the author; this exhibition provoked a mixed reaction from the critical society, namely because it marked the turning point in the development of contemporary art, where the documentary became the essential language of creation. Okwui addresses a whole range of hard-to-solve problems related to documentary photography, video, and cinema. The essential contrariety is the attitude towards Sontag's idea of the "ethics of looking," that is, the capacity of a spectator to decode a documentary image, to read its subjective characteristics and to relate them with representations of the image truthfulness and reality itself. The main concerns for the author are the reasons of interest that the artists and image-creators show in reality, and the depiction of everyday life, as well as the influence of reality on the conscience of a modern human.
