Artificial hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship

For over a decade, conceptual and performance art has been dominated by participatory art. Its champions, such as French curator Nicolas Bourriaud (who invented the term relational aesthetics to describe it) and American art historian Grant Kester, believe that by encouraging an audience to join in, the artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art. The book follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of the participatory aesthetic, in both Europe and America. This itinerary takes in Futurism, Dada, Situationism, Czechoslovakian Happenings, and…