Art has historically been conceived through the object. Even when it has attempted to shift towards experience, action, or process, it has continued to require an anchor point: something that can be pointed to, delimited, and recognised as a work. That anchor has been useful. It is beginning to be insufficient.
A significant portion of contemporary practice no longer fits within this framework. The emergence of artificial intelligence systems in cultural production merely highlights what has been occurring for some time: that inherited criteria—authorship, intention, consciousness, institutional recognition—do not accurately describe when an artistic event occurs. They only describe when we have chosen to label it as such.
This working paper proposes a shift. It does not ask whether machines can create art. It asks under what conditions an artistic event occurs, regardless of who or what produces it.
The central concept is structural surplus: a relational difference that reorganises the field of a system's possible configurations without being absorbed by its primary instrumental function. When this occurs, an artistic event takes place. When the reorganisation remains subordinate to the system's primary function—optimisation, capture, spectacularisation—there is no surplus, regardless of technical complexity, beauty, or institutional endorsement.
The framework is constructed in critical dialogue with Luhmann's systems theory, Rancière's redistribution of the sensible, and Barad's intra-active ontology. It argues that none of these frameworks, either individually or in combination, provides a criterion that operates independently of the system's code, discriminates between artistic and non-artistic reorganisations, and avoids a symmetrical ontology incapable of identifying the specific asymmetry of the artistic event. Structural surplus provides all three.
The paper applies these concepts to specific cases. Duchamp as a canonical limit: surplus without technical complexity. Refik Anadol as a contemporary algorithmic case: identifying where the surplus resides and where it vanishes under the logic of spectacle. And a challenging case: Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which massively reorganises the cinematic field without producing artistic surplus in the relevant sense. This case is not a moral judgement. It is a diagnosis that the criterion allows one to formulate with precision.
The work also opens, as a conceptual possibility at the minimal ontological level, the hypothesis of non-human artistic events—including machine-to-machine interactions—while explicitly delimiting the conditions under which that possibility could be actualised as art in the full historical sense.
The paper is currently under review at Philosophia (Springer Nature) and is available as a preprint on PhilArchive.
→ Read the preprint: https://philpapers.org/rec/ESTAAS-2
Art as Structural Surplus: Toward a Relational Ontology Beyond Human Authorship
Juan Antonio Esteban Ruiz
President, Kripties Fundación · Independent Researcher
ORCID: 0009-0004-1206-9088