Participatory projects currently occupy a significant portion of cultural programming and, certainly, a substantial part of the work undertaken by a foundation such as the one I direct: workshops with communities, collaborative works, and processes that include those who are typically excluded. They are applauded, almost by default, with a vocabulary that has become familiar—inclusive, collaborative, transformative, committed. Within this automatic applause lies an uncomfortable question we rarely pose: when we evaluate one of these projects, are we judging it as art or as a good deed?
This is not a capricious distinction. It lies at the heart of a debate that has remained open in art theory for two decades and which warrants consideration before continuing to distribute accolades.
Claire Bishop highlighted a stinging point in her essay 'The Social Turn' and subsequently in Artificial Hells: a significant portion of participatory art is judged through what she termed an ethical turn. A project is valued for its collaboration, its inclusion, its social utility, and its good intentions, while the artistic judgment itself—the form, the conflict, the ambiguity, the quality of what occurs—is discreetly suspended. It is as if questioning the aesthetic value of a work created with a community were in poor taste, almost a lack of respect towards that community. Bishop maintains the opposite: to exempt these projects from artistic judgment is to fail to take them seriously as art.
Her critique is sharpened against the idea extended from Bourriaud's relational aesthetics: that generating an encounter or dialogue is, in itself, valuable and democratic. It is not necessarily so, Bishop responds: an interaction can be flat, complacent, or even a scenography of consensus. In opposition to this, she champions antagonism, friction, and discomfort as part of what serious social art can produce.
Grant Kester argues that in certain dialogical and collaborative practices, the relationship is not an addition on the margins of the work: it is the very form of the work. It is not a matter of goodness versus aesthetics, but of recognising that there are works whose material consists of relationships and which demand their own criteria to be judged. It would be a mistake to reduce this to a caricature—Bishop the formalist, Kester the sentimentalist. Both think more deeply than that. Kester redefines what counts as form; Bishop redefines what politics art can possess without relinquishing judgment.
Participation, community, and ethics are conditions for reading a work, not automatic substitutes for its artistic value. A project can be socially impeccable and artistically null. And conversely: it can be uncomfortable, include no one, and yet genuinely reorganise the way in which we perceive something. That a process does good does not guarantee that it makes art, and confusing the two impoverishes us twofold.
When a foundation evaluates its own participatory projects solely by their benevolence—how many participated, how inclusive they were, how good everyone felt—it tells itself a pleasant story and avoids the difficult question: was this, beyond being well-intentioned, good as art? Evading that question appears respectful, yet it is the opposite. To treat a community project as if it could not aspire to artistic value is to treat it as second-rate art. Demanding more of it is not elitism: it is respect.
The finest socially engaged art occurs precisely when those two things cease to be separated. When care also considers form, and form also includes. When the relationship with a community does not substitute for artistic work but is the artistic work, executed with the same rigour we would demand of any other piece. One must not choose between doing good and making art. One must refuse to let the former serve as an alibi for failing to demand the latter.
On the open conversation
This text is part of my sub-series Art and Society, which examines without excuses what culture can and cannot do for society; here, why the good social intention of a work does not substitute for its value as a work. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of aesthetics, art criticism, the theory of participatory art, or curating, the notebook remains open.
Sources
Bishop, Claire. 'The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents'. Artforum, February 2006.
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Verso, 2012.
Bishop, Claire. 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics'. October 110 (2004): 51-79.
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. University of California Press, 2004.
Kester, Grant H. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Duke University Press, 2011.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. 1998 (English ed., Les presses du réel, 2002).