Lebenskünstler

…many of the new forms of collaborative and participatory art make no distinction between art as political praxis and political praxis itself; art, it is claimed, is a form of political praxis.

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…”enclosure” is as much cognitive and cultural as it is economic.

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This has produced a range of practices along two fundamental axes: first, the idea of artistic collaboration between an artist or artists and a group of participants as the model of an ideal intellectual community; and second, the notion of the artist or artists acting in collaboration with a non artistic community or group in order to ameliorate or change a given state of affairs, as a counter to external forces of neglect, coercion, or oppression.

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…each sets out to enact and make visible a process of free exchange and participation irreducible to the enclosures of the commodity form, the boundaries of medium-based practice, the institutional spaces of the official art world, and the historical distinctions between art praxis and social or political praxis.

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This does not mean that discursive, pedagogic, and dialogue-based works escape the commodity form; even temporal interventions have to purchase commodities on the market in order to pursue their “non-commodified” outcomes. Moreover, in order to enter into dialogue with an audience or collaborators artists have to transform the content of what they do into intellectual goods…[Yet, these forms] establish an important centrifugal dynamic for art in the present period: namely the development of an art after “art in the expanded field” in which the collective forms of of participatory production and reception become constitutive of these open-ended research interests.

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…autonomy always has to be won anew from the conditions in which art finds itself, irrespective of its material or immaterial forms.

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…the official art world seems less and less a place where artists might think and work…

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…the conditions of emancipation are not lying in wait for us and as such need to be produced here and now…