The main subject of this essay is The Museum of Modern Art of New York's purchasing an ensemble of identity photographs took by a young servant of Pol Pot's regime (the leader of Cambodian Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, who exterminated thousands of civilians during this period), specially enrolled in a professional training of photography for this purpose. As reported by the youth, he just felt himself as someone engaged in a bureaucratic ritual, previous to the execution of the prisoners. The author argues that the public exhibition of the photos in a cultural event, and then they being incorporated, in 1997, to the permanent collection of an important art museum have carried the institutionalization and the naturalizing of these images into art objects; he also denounces, in the light of these episodes, the failure of the premises which traditionally grounded the humanist legitimization of art and art institution.
contemporary art; photography; art institutions; Nhem Ein; aesthetic judgement
