Philippe Parreno at Park Avenue Armory

(link)

Estranging experience, a radical redefining of the exhibition ritual, recontextualizing the social, what RA really brought over from the experience economy was an entertainment system, and it is fun, this is fun blockbuster art, and that is important, that could be theorized and conceptualized, a value-added for museums that could adopt its populist modes to adorn their lobbies with an outreach program of social fantasy that critical demographics could more than happily accept as art.

Co-curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Alex Poots, with consulting curator Tom Eccles.


And see too: Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper

Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper

(Link: Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper, Schinkel Pavillon, Pilar Corrias)

Parreno always felt askew in the ideological containment of Relational Aesthetics. Yet Kelsey’s final cut at Relational programs as coup-de-grace description: “capitalist realist adaptation of art to the experience economy” fits particularly unfortunately well to Parreno. Parreno’s premised on a pagan-importance of experience run through the fun-house of post-modernity, a contemporary update of some of the quasi-spiritualism of minimalism’s Light and Space and Irwins phenomenological trips, forgetting the name of the thing one saw as a salve to ordering impulse of capital, rendered now (further realist ala Kelsey) with symbols and mis-en-scene, alienating the experience of today’s banalities towards the to-what-ends? of the real contention of RA. If no one has made such bold claims in the beginning we wouldn't have had the maelstorm that colors the sight of these things today and they would look like mere art, instead of politically contentious objects that fall under a name that we can't forget and thus cannot see.