The Politics of Participatory Art

The two books reviewed in this article engage with ‘participatory art’, in which artists mobilise people as the central medium of their work. Grant Kester argues that such works have the potential to generate new communal forms that challenge neoliberal hegemony, while Claire Bishop argues that in dispensing with the negating praxis of the avant-garde they all too frequently end up reproducing its logics. The article suggests that if the binary that structures both their arguments is overcome, a productive synthesis of their arguments can be made – although this still leaves unanswered a number of questions about the role that art might play in social change.

Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.

Kester, G. H. (2011) The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press