This essay narrates the responses of its author to an exhibition on fetishism during the summer of 1998 in Paris. She critiques the strategies underlying this show and, in so doing, describes and comments extensively on a number of particularly striking pieces, each of which, she claims, ch allenges, contributes to, and complicates its viewers' notions of “fetish.”

The essay raises such questions as: What is the efficacy of visual material when used to convey and clarify concepts? What curatorial choices are implied when potentially disturbing or erotically provocative art is publicly exhibited? What are the complexities involved in sorting out differences between documentary-based and more fanciful, imaginative art?

Finally, the author asks about the relations between “fetishism,” as it is seen here, and representations of desire more generally.