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.

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

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).

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

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

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

to extend this invitation to engage socially very widely, across all audiences equitably, perhaps even democratically.

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.