Participatory projects occupy a significant portion of cultural programming today, and certainly a large part of the work of a foundation such as the one I direct: workshops with communities, collaborative works, and processes that include those who are usually left out. They are applauded, almost by default, with a vocabulary we are already familiar with—inclusive, collaborative, transformative, committed. And there, in that automatic applause, lies an uncomfortable question we rarely ask ourselves: when we evaluate one of these projects, are we judging it as art, or as a good deed?

This is not a whimsical distinction. It is the centre of a debate that has been ongoing in art theory for two decades, and one that is worth understanding before continuing to distribute praise.

On one side, Claire Bishop. In her essay 'The Social Turn' and later in Artificial Hells, she pointed out something that stings: a good deal of participatory art is judged through what she called an ethical turn. A project is valued for its collaboration, its inclusion, its social utility, its good intentions, and the strictly artistic judgement—the form, the conflict, the ambiguity, the quality of what occurs—is suspended, discreetly. As if asking about the aesthetic value of a work made with a community were in poor taste, almost a lack of respect towards the community. Bishop maintains the opposite: that exonerating these projects from artistic judgement is, at heart, failing to take them seriously as art.

Her critique sharpens against the idea, widespread since Bourriaud's relational aesthetics, that generating 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. Against this, she champions antagonism, friction, and discomfort as part of what serious social art can produce.

On the other side, it is worth considering Grant Kester, because without him the history remains incomplete and becomes unfair. 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 is relationships, and which demand their own criteria to be judged. It would be a mistake to turn this into a caricature—Bishop the formalist, Kester the do-gooder. Both think better than that. Kester redefines what counts as form; Bishop redefines what politics art can have without renouncing judgement.

What I take from the debate, and what I believe an honest foundation should assume, is this: 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 vice versa: it can be uncomfortable, include no one, and yet genuinely reorganise the way we look at something. That a process does good does not guarantee that it makes art, and confusing the two impoverishes us twice over.

I say this from within, not from the sidelines. When a foundation evaluates its own participatory projects solely by their goodness—how many participated, how inclusive they were, how good everyone felt—it tells itself a pleasant story and avoids the difficult question: was this, besides being well-intentioned, good as art? Evading that question seems respectful, but it is the opposite. Treating a community project as if it could not aspire to artistic value is treating it as second-rate art. Demanding more from it is not elitism: it is respect.

And here is what truly interests me, without cynicism: the best of socially committed 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 replace artistic work but is the artistic work, executed with the same rigour we would demand of any piece. One does not have to choose between doing good and making art. One must refuse to let the former serve as an alibi for not demanding the latter.

On 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).