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.

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

exclusivity rather than inclusivity,

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

Nicolas Bourriaud has famously termed socially ‘relational’ (Bourriaud, 2002)

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.

The type of pluralist community relational art might offer, Morgan suggests, is that evoked by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms ‘being-with’, ‘being-in-common’ and ‘being-with-each-other’, which accommodate difference in mutuality (ibid., pp. 16 and 26; see, for example, Nancy, 2000).

‘thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers’ (p. 58).

– social engagement and equality of opportunity – are, for me, two of its most precious possibilities.