Ei Arakawa at Artists Space

(link)

Was Arakawa's always just a relational aesthetics program upgraded for networks? A restaurant of friends, a social gathering as exhibitionary lighthouse beacon? The Radiants. Less exhibitions than event organizing. You make it up on the spot. This begets The Fear: a "low-grade Stockholm syndrome that many people engaged in participatory art suffer, the primary symptom being their inability to accept that something quite underwhelming could result from so much time and energy spent in captive social engagement." ... "to begin to understand how art institutions might be attracted to participatory art as an instinctive form of biological survival."

Because: the system shifts from content generation to interactivity itself, turning itself into interface for the user/viewer to self-produce. This is the turnkey-operation entrepreneurial dream, in which as long as the structure is up and running "content-revenue" will self-generate, perfect museum lobby bait. It fulfills the institutional functions in their programs whose goals like "outreach" have kids painting in the style of those artist to see themselves as, and mimicking the corporate strategies [speaker invites] as a manic oversized art-as-cartoon-absurdity version constructing a real crowdpleaser if there ever was one.