The standard cliché summary of modern (and contemporary) art is that now, anything is art. Jackson Pollock threw paint around. Duchamp strung up a shovel, upended a bike wheel into a stool, put a urinal on a pedestal and called the resulting three “sculptures” art of the highest order. After so long, we've started to run out of things to suddenly deem “art.” But relational aesthetics, or the posing of an artist-constructed social experiences as art making, is the latest step in this process of turning everything into art.
The goal of most relational aesthetics art is to create a social circumstance; the viewer experience of the constructed social environment becomes the art. The task of the artist is to become a conduit for this social experience. To that end, artists often create a physical space to be used for a particular (often ephemeral) social event. What is this “social event,” you ask? Well, almost anything could constitute a relational aesthetics event: a communal meal, a discussion … even sitting around.
