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

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

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).

exclusivity rather than inclusivity,

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

social engagement to sustain democracy, people’s shared exercise of power. All of these essentials of social life are jeopardized by contemporary cultural trends which damage communication and prioritize self-interest.

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

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

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.