Michael Huber x eSeL: "Prosuming Art"

23.10. – 11.01. | eSeL Rezeption

Opening together with other MQ Schauräume: Wed. 22.10., 18h 2025

The exhibition “Prosuming Art” presents the humorous “scribbles” of KURIER art critic Michael Huber to the public for the first time – spontaneous drawings that are mostly created directly on press conference documents during the conferences themselves. These tongue-in-cheek visual ideas – often in the form of visual punchlines – serve as a creative bridge between conceptual and visual thinking for cultural journalists. These visual “transcripts” help him to reconnect what he has seen and heard before conveying his art experience to a broad audience in the form of journalistic texts.
In the exhibition, Huber's drawings enter into a playful dialogue with selected photographs by eSeL (Lorenz Seidler) and at the same time review exhibition highlights from the last two decades.
The show highlights different journalistic roles in the art world and shows how engaging with contemporary art across all levels of art reception—from critics to the audience—is also reflected in one's own creative practice as a “prosumer.”

Michael Huber is a cultural journalist and art critic at KURIER. He regularly writes articles on current exhibitions and moderates discussion events on the social relevance of contemporary art. In addition to his journalistic work, Huber is also active as a musician. The “press conference drawings” have so far only been published privately on Facebook. 
Michael Huber was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Art Criticism by the Republic of Austria in 2025.

Lorenz “eSeL” Seidler sees himself as an “aesthetic way of life” that plays with the boundaries between art production, photography, and communication of art. As editor of the eSeL.at platform and initiator of numerous projects, he moves between journalistic and artistic activities with the aim of providing low-threshold access to contemporary art.
The two are connected not only by their shared studies of art history at the University of Vienna, but also by decades of observing—and helping to shape—the Viennese art scene from different perspectives.
Despite different formats and communication channels, both pursue a common goal: to show publicly how participation, appropriation, and creative engagement with art are possible—and how their journalistic work can inspire others to actively engage with art and culture.
“Prosuming Art” shows that creative practice and journalistic observation are not mutually exclusive, but coexist in productive tension—constantly opening up new perspectives on the art system, both for eSeL and Huber as participating observers and for the art audience.