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This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). Martens's film is a conceptual film that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such images. It argues that the film, which creates troubling identifications and disidentifications for a Western spectator, offers a politically productive lesson on the power of discomfort to disrupt unethical image practices. Communication studies scholars have engaged in these conversations via studies about identification and disidentification and the documentary genre; affect in cinematic media; and more directly, through work that investigates the perils of cookie‐cutter frames for representing (racialized) poverty.

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This article investigates the Rivera controversy at Rockefeller Center arguing that the controversy illuminates tensions in democratic culture over the role of the masses and their relation to the “legitimate” public, exhibited in anxieties about phantom publics and barbarian crowds. Beginning with critical discourse surrounding the construction of Rockefeller Center, the mural controversy is resituated within a broader frame in which revanchist anxieties and worry about mass media play a crucial role. Appeals during the construction of the building to the “public” character of the structure took on a life of their own during the apex of the Rivera controversy.

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