Primary research line. It addresses the ontology of art from a relational perspective that shifts the centrality of the human subject without trivialising the concept of art.
The central hypothesis: art is not defined by the author's consciousness or the technical complexity of the device, but by the emergence of structural surplus within open relational systems, and by the actualisation of that surplus in the field historically sedimented as art.
Theoretical framework
Art as Structural Surplus: Toward a Relational Ontology Beyond Human Authorship
Working paper · Juan Antonio Esteban Ruiz · ORCID 0009-0004-1206-9088
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 it. The emergence of artificial intelligence systems in cultural production merely evidences what has been occurring for some time: the inherited criteria—authorship, intention, consciousness, institutional recognition—do not accurately describe when an artistic event occurs. They only describe when we have called it so.
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 exists. When the reorganisation remains subordinated to the system's primary function—optimisation, capture, spectacularisation—there is no surplus, even if there is 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, 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 symmetric ontology incapable of identifying the specific asymmetry of the artistic event. Structural surplus provides all three.
The paper is applied to concrete cases. Duchamp as a canonical limit: surplus without technical complexity. Refik Anadol as a contemporary algorithmic case: where the surplus lies and where it disappears under the logic of spectacle. And a difficult 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 judgment. It is a diagnosis that the criterion allows us 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.
Structural surplus allows for the consideration of the artistic event without recourse to authorship. Here, I test it in the field where this question is most urgent today: generative art.
Status
Working paper, version 2.5 (June 2026). Published on Zenodo with a permanent DOI and also available on PhilArchive. Currently undergoing peer review prior to its next editorial proposal.
Recommended citation:
Esteban, J. A. (2026). Art as Structural Surplus: Toward a Relational Ontology Beyond Human Authorship (v. 2.5). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20020706