The exhibition brings together a generation of artists who came up through independent and artist-run spaces, from Melbourne to London, New York, Frankfurt and Vienna, and shows their work in conversation with two historical positions: a Cindy Sherman film still and one of the Kandors by Mike Kelley.

Around 1980 those two artists began making work out of the images that surrounded them: film, television, advertising. The artists gathered here grew up with far more images, on screens that also look back at them. The title gives one answer to what that does: to be seen today is to be judged, by everyone and by no one in particular.

The phrase was first said in Paris. Received at the Académie française in 1775, Malesherbes announced that a tribunal independent of every power had arisen: public opinion, before which government and opposition now pleaded their case. The English court of public opinion is documented from 1794; Bentham made it an institution whose weapon is publicity and whose enemy is secrecy. In the twentieth century it became a defendant's phrase. Today it is the ordinary condition of the image: a court with no judge, no hearing and no appeal.

The works in the exhibition do not comment on that condition; they come out of it.