Introduction

“Rather, the sphere of ontology is that of the external world, that is, something that one cannot explain or interpret or change: it is like a solid rock, which one comes across and breaks one’s spade upon.”1

Against realism, which accepts that a world exists outside our perception, the contemporary art world is encircled by an anti-realism. In this world, artworks have turned into rapidly consumed “content” for “experiences to be interpreted by humans.” Experience and interpretation are among the points that museums, galleries, art publications, and fine art schools dwell on most.

Works arrive with exhibition texts and captions that studiously avoid saying anything clear or definite, and they get shaped, individually and in groups, by the viewer’s experiences and opinions in various interpretive events. In schools, “cool professors dressed in black” endlessly interpret work in front of students who aren’t sure what they’re doing. At exhibitions, we artists line up scattered phrases that show we don’t know how to put our own work into words. We keep wanting to hear visitors’ feedback, insights that the artist will only notice afterward.

As part of this process, concepts like “ambiguity,” “uncanniness,” “poetry,” and “indeterminacy” are placed before us every few years in new guises and continually reinterpreted. We have an endless chance to interpret what is poetic, so why stop? We are clearly caught in a feedback loop.

Why does the viewer’s experience and interpretation occupy such a central place in contemporary art? Interpretation-oriented activities must also stem, in part, from the public functions of institutions grounded in social responsibility. The concern to bring viewers together with works does matter for art institutions. Still, these largely unexamined, interpretation-oriented approaches rest on deeper, unquestioned assumptions about how we relate to the world. In this series of essays I’ll try to understand those assumptions and explore the possibilities that lie beyond the world of interpretation and experience.

While trying to grasp our current understandings of art, I also realized I couldn’t find satisfying answers to questions like “Why do we mount exhibitions?” or “Why do we show our work to people?” During this inquiry I came across Suhail Malik’s striking essay “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” in the volume Realism Materialism Art. Malik, director of the MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths and known for his critical writing, sets out the philosophical foundations of contemporary art’s human-centered obsession with experience and interpretation, and argues that (from a speculative realist perspective) it needs to be destroyed. In this series I’ll take up his critique from different angles, unpacking the relevant terms as I go.

Interpretation and Experience

Contemporary art, heavily influenced by post-structuralist theories, views reality as a social construct shaped by language and power. In the words of the editors of Realism Materialism Art: “For the last generation and a half, critical art practices and theories have taken up post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist challenges to conventions of originality, authorship, and identity. In this paradigm, art is construed as always caught up in webs of discourse and interpretation without origin, end, or ground.”2 This approach confines art to human-centered narratives.

Existing theories routinely reduce artworks to mere reflections of the artist’s intentions or the viewer’s interpretations. Inevitably, this turns the work into a passive object. Its formal, historical, and material dimensions, including the conditions of its making, are left in the shadow of the emphasis on discourse. It also narrows the scope of the aesthetic, treating art as a “game of signs and symbols” with no direct connection to reality.

“What does an artwork mean for you? What sense do you make of it? In the paradigm of contemporary art the answer is clear: it’s up to you. Constrained by the artwork’s subject matter (insofar as you can determine it), its material organization and presentation (including online transience), and the information you can glean from the press release, the artist’s ‘interests,’ or what the art invokes, you respond to this configuration of mild injunctions. ‘Mild’ because the parameters are open enough, loose enough, opaque enough for you to (have to) make your own way through the artwork. It asks you a question, making an open-ended assertion without definitive sense. You reply—usually not to the artwork but, in the best case, with a shift in your own system of ideas, values, even the very way you formulate your languages. You are the center of the artwork.”3

In contemporary art, the emphasis on interpretation is intertwined with aesthetic experience, because experience opens a space for interpretation. Aesthetic objects, whether artworks and designs or natural landscapes, do not have fixed, inherent meanings. They acquire meaning through subjective interpretation. Contemporary art rests heavily on subjective aesthetic experience; meaning emerges through the viewer’s engagement with the work. The process of interpretation is not only about understanding what the artwork is, but about grasping how it interacts with the viewer’s thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. The meaning of contemporary art is therefore produced through a relationship among the artwork, its context, and the viewer’s personal response, which makes it an intensely individual experiential domain.

Here you might ask, “So what’s the problem?” Experience undoubtedly runs through the whole texture of life and seems indispensable for art as well. The problem is that contemporary art’s inflated emphasis on the subjectivity of experience pushes every sort of objective-world possibility into the background and takes up an anti-realist stance by placing the human subject at the center of the universe.

Because meaning in contemporary art is generated through the viewer’s subjective experience, the artwork is defined as if it were incomplete without the viewer’s interpretation and participation. We often hear artists complain after their exhibitions that their work wasn’t interpreted enough, didn’t appear in enough publications, didn’t spark enough discussion. This lays bare how dependent the work becomes on external engagement and interpretation to fulfill its purpose.

Malik argues that contemporary art is fundamentally flawed because it rests on the human-centered ideas inherent to “aesthetic experience.” He claims this makes contemporary art philosophically bankrupt and politically impotent.

Relational Aesthetics

One of the first fields that comes to mind when we talk about experience and interpretation in contemporary art is relational and participatory art. For Nicolas Bourriaud, relational art was a form that took the whole of human relations and their social context as its subject.4 In relational aesthetics, the artwork creates a social setting where people come together to take part in a shared activity.

Bourriaud argued that the role of artworks is no longer to construct “imaginary and utopian realities,” but to construct ways of living and models of action “within the existing real,” at whatever scale the artist chooses. Although this view, with its emphasis on real life, seems at first to open the door to a realist philosophy, it doesn’t have a realist foundation, because it places human experience at the center and doesn’t separate the work’s existence from its interpretation.

Claire Bishop has argued that Bourriaud misreads post-structuralist theory by conflating the openness of interpretation with the openness of the artwork itself. Post-structuralists pointed to the instability of meaning in texts, proposing that interpretations are fluid and open to reassessment. Bourriaud mistakenly attributes that fluidity to the existence of the artwork.

For Bishop, this misapplication produces several problems. First, the difficulty of defining the artwork amid its supposed constant change neglects the work’s internal structure. Even if interpretations can be multiple and varied, the artwork’s own material and conceptual coherence remains intact.

The excessive emphasis on viewer participation, meanwhile, routinely sidelines critical perspectives. Bishop notes that relational art naively overlooks the hierarchical power relations, exclusions, and conflicts present in any social context. The “harmonious,” “democratic” portrayal of participation fails to reflect the realities of social relations, which are often grounded in inequality: “If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?”5

Interaction, Interaction, Interaction

Relational aesthetics spread worldwide through the biennial circuit, became dominant, and influenced other art forms. Today we see institutions warming to “democratic,” experience-oriented art that privileges the viewer. Some of these works carry a kind of “public relations” function along with them.

As a current example of contemporary art’s focus on experience, consider Olafur Eliasson’s remarks in his interview with Elif Dastarlı:

“In choosing the title Your unexpected encounter, I wanted to extend an open invitation to the viewer, calling them to step into a space of curiosity and inquiry. I wanted to spark a sense of discovery in the viewer, to make them feel that here, in the exhibition, they could find something unfamiliar that challenges their perception or stirs their imagination. So ‘encounter’ here also involves active participation and introspection. The exhibition isn’t just about observing art but interacting with it, which makes the viewer an essential part of the work.”6

Eliasson’s focus on creating “unexpected encounters” puts human experience and perception ahead of the objects themselves, which runs counter to the ecological perspective he claims to take up in his work. To say that anything is completed only by human experience is plainly a human-centered view.

Although Eliasson aims at “active participation” from visitors, we all know the usual outcome is a few weeks’ uptick in social media stories from viewers caught up in the novelty of the experience.

His Ice Watch (2014), in which he placed tons of ice in city centers to raise public awareness of the climate crisis, can also be cited as an example of what gets done in the name of human experience. The ice blocks in the work were moved out of their natural environment at significant environmental cost, in order to give visitors an experience that would, in turn, heighten their ecological awareness. The work can also be read as propaganda for shallow, human-centered ecological fixes that target surface symptoms such as pollution and resource consumption, which primarily concern wealthy nations.

Another area where this experience-driven aim is especially common is new media art. To get a sense of the clichés in the field, I gave ChatGPT the prompt “list new media art proposals.” It produced the following:

A few proposals in new media art covering a range of disciplines, techniques, and themes:

  1. Virtual Reality (VR):
    • Creating virtual environments users can interact with.
    • Experiences aimed at building empathy or exploring social issues.
  2. Augmented Reality (AR):
    • Providing interactive experiences by adding digital elements to the physical world.
    • Virtual art installations in public spaces.
  3. Data Visualization:
    • Making sense of large datasets through visual representation.
    • Enabling viewers to interact with data.
  4. Interactive Installations:
    • Artistic experiences that change with the viewer’s movements or choices.
    • Using sensory feedback mechanisms to heighten participation.

As one example in this field, Refik Anadol, who favors terms like “dreams” and “hallucinations” that gesture toward blurring reality, says the following in his TED talk:

“The work invites the audience to be part of a spectacular aesthetic experience in a living urban space by depicting a fluid network of connections of the city itself. It also stands as a reminder of how invisible data from our everyday lives, like the Twitter feeds that are represented here, can be made visible and transformed into sensory knowledge that can be experienced collectively. In fact, data can only become knowledge when it’s experienced, and what is knowledge and experience can take many forms.”7

Visualization on its own clearly doesn’t generate knowledge; what’s really meant here is sensory effect. Once data is abstracted into a spectacle of aesthetic experience for humans, its tie to the world snaps and it becomes impossible to read. From a realist standpoint, it becomes questionable whether it still counts as data at all. As with Eliasson, a homogeneous, generic audience is assumed to receive and interpret the data.

In sum, in contemporary art and in many adjacent fields, artworks are generally treated as open-ended prompts for personal reflection and experience. As a result, they are reduced to passive vehicles for the viewer’s projections. Stranger still, even when the aim is to engage objective reality or nonhuman perspectives, human subjectivity is what gets targeted.

In the next piece, I’ll continue from Suhail Malik’s critique and turn to the question of contemporary art’s “correlationist” roots.

Footnotes

  1. Maurizio Ferraris, Hysteresis: The External World, ed. and trans. Sarah De Sanctis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 15. ↩

  2. Christoph Cox and Suhail Malik, “Introduction,” in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (London: Sternberg Press, 2015), 26. ↩

  3. Suhail Malik, “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (London: Sternberg Press, 2015), 185. ↩

  4. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002). [Originally cited in the Turkish edition: İlişkisel Estetik, trans. Saadet Özen (Istanbul: Bağlam Yayınları, 2005).] ↩

  5. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79. ↩

  6. Olafur Eliasson, interview with Elif Dastarlı (Istanbul, 2024). Translated from the Turkish by the author. ↩

  7. Refik Anadol, “Art in the Age of Machine Intelligence,” TED, August 2020, ted.com/talks/refik_anadol_art_in_the_age_of_machine_intelligence. ↩