This introduction to Georg Simmel’s essay ‘On Art Exhibitions’ (1890) sketches the context and relevance of some striking points of commonality to Walter Benjamin’s much better-known ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ of 1936, as well as to Simmel’s own subsequent essay on ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ of 1903. The introduction is followed by a complete English translation.