Michael Fried's "absorption and theatricality."

Briefly: I just came from a lecture by Michael Fried, and in the discussion session afterward, the question of subject/object interaction kept coming up in Fried's constant employment of the pair "absorption and theatricality"--Yves-Alain Bois described it as "the engine that allows you to see." This was challenged at several points--it seems that your (Fried's) criticism only takes into account the presence of a single beholder. What about a crowd viewing the work? Similarly important to Fried's "absorption and theatricality" is the staging of a kind of absorption. But in so doing, how do you ascribe the intentionality of the artist to that work and stage a sort of direct one-on-one confrontation with it? Fried keeps going back to the art object 'performing' these types--performing the address to an observer (anything else is virtually impossible?), performing a kind of intentionality of its creator. The art Fried is interested in does not provide raw access to intentionality, but thematizes intentionality itself.

It strikes me that this debate never seemed to be resolved in discussion--the various partisans remained entrenched. And it also strikes me that Benjamin seems to easily skate across this binary of subject-object interaction in his discussion of folk art and kitsch, when he writes "Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch teach allow us to see outward from within things." And it's even more striking to me that the media through which Benjamin 'solves' this problem, or at least finds a way to think beyond it, is through a (sort of) technics of mass art, through collective, popular culture.