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

Bourriaud makes several very important contributions to understandings of the form in Relational Aesthetics. He enumerates and details the trend in visual, sculptural and installation art, discussing many vivid examples in detail. He sets it within art historical and theoretical contexts. And he argues for what he sees it achieving. While it does n

Harvey argues that ‘[t]he present economic difficulties in both the US and Britain, as well as throughout Europe, are essentially being deepened for a political reason rather than out of economic necessity. That political reason is the desire to have done with capital’s responsibility to cover costs of social reproduction’ (ibid., p. 269),

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

to contextualize these socially engaged art and performance practices in broader social and material contexts in order to consider not only what kinds of opportunities for what qualitative experiences of participation the art practices ‘themselves’ offer audiences, but also, importantly, how those opportunities are affected by the practices’ social

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

The question of the significance of participation, though vital to much contemporary work, is one that should be treated with some suspicion. The mere involvement of the actions of audience members is not enough to assume a vital or direct relationship to the work of art …. How the exchange of participation takes place must be carefully framed, so

We need some ‘fellow feeling’, some social sympathy, to check unreserved self-interest.

Who gets to do what, where, when and how in this cultural practice, and how does this affect people? What are this practice’s relationships to social engagement, communication, social justice, equality and democracy; how might it contribute to or weaken them? If it invites participation, who can participate and on what terms? What is the quality of

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.