Barcelona’s Loop art fair, which started in 2003, is the oldest and most established initiative to assert the commercial potential of film and video. The medium’s ephemeral nature, and its associations with the very different market values of cinema, have contributed to a continued reluctance from collectors, attracted by the aura of more traditional art forms. Paradoxically, these tricky market credentials have recently endowed the moving image with a critical cachet in institutional art spaces and museums. As the institutional assimilation of practices traditionally seen as marginal, and oppositional, to the art market continues—from experimental film to the documentary—the instrumental role of film and video takes on a significant historical resonance in art discourse. In order to assign value to this wayward and ambiguous media within the context of an art fair, Loop has to negotiate a conflicted territory. How to maintain its more market-driven function without appearing to dismiss these historic discourses of disavowal, which will themselves provide validation for the sale of moving image works? I received the answer at my hotel desk, where I received the exhibition catalogue for “Empathy,” Harun Farocki’s show at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. The enclosed compliment slip asserts Farocki’s role as a “close …