Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Performance Interventions)

two of the main ‘costs of inequality’ are ‘community life and social relations’ and ‘social mobility’ (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010).

Socially turned theatre and performance, likewise, actively engage their audiences.

agree with Morgan that participation is not intrinsically politically progressive. Thus, though I seek these practices’ democratic potential and look for ways they extend equal opportunities for social engagement, I also pay attention to ways they constrain or suppress those opportunities.

These subsequent chapters often look at a greater range of art and performance beyond the participatory forms outlined above and in Chapter 1, because they ask how participation in culture is more broadly and fundamentally affected not just by artistic practices but also by policy-making, spatial organization and arts funding.

seem to offer widespread constructive social engagement, with participants communicating, collaborating, co-creating and mutually supporting one another.

these artworks ‘construct models of sociability suitable for producing human relations, the same way an architecture literally “produces” the itineraries of those presiding in it’ (p. 70).

I believe in and want social engagement because people are, need to be and benefit from being socially interdependent.

‘relational aesthetics’

For some critics, including Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan and critic Claire Bishop, Bourriaud’s approach and his claims risk, themselves, being utopian, naïve and unrealistic.

I explore what models of social relation and community these practices can produce, while I remain wary of models that either fetishize a myth of a unified singularity and thereby obliterate difference, or propose an unresolved multitude. I seek models of community that recognize people’s social interdependence without assimilating their distinctiv