Claire Bishop

“For Bal-Blanc, the difference between works of art and capitalism is that artists appropriate perverted power for themselves, in order to produce reoriented and multiple roles (as opposed to the singular roles of industrialisation). As such, they propose new forms of transgression, and prompt a ‘secousse’ (jolt) in the viewer. As Bal-Blanc suggests, in delegated performance two types of perversion confront each other face to face: the perversity exercised by institutions and presented as a norm, and that employed by artists which by contrast appears as an anomaly.”
― claire bishop

“To protect against this threat of art’s self-
extinction, Guattari suggests that each work of art must have a ‘double finality’: ‘[Firstly] to insert itself into a social network which will either appropriate or reject it, and [secondly] to celebrate, once again, the Universe of art as such, precisely because it is always in danger of collapsing.’ Guattari’s language of a double finality speaks to the double ontology of cross-disciplinary projects we are so frequently presented with today, pre- eminently among them art-as-pedagogy. Like all long-term participatory projects, this art must tread the fine line of a dual horizon – faced towards the social field but also towards art itself, addressing both its immediate participants and subsequent audiences. It needs to be successful within both art and the social field, but ideally also testing and revising the criteria we apply to both domains. Without this double finality, such projects risk becoming ‘edu-tainment’ or ‘pedagogical aesthetics’.”
― Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship