Nicolas Bourriaud:

Relational Aesthetics is a “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”

Robert Smithson:

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

David Hammons:

That’s why I like doing stuff better on the street, because the art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have any seniority over anything else.

Rirkrit Tiravanija:

It is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people.

Carsten Höller:

It's about making an experience work beyond just going to see a sculpture that is in a museum. It's so much more interesting to produce an environment where you can subject yourself to a very personal experience, where you can use that experience as the raw material, rather than simply oil paints or marble..

Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

When people ask me, “Who is your public?” I say honestly, without skipping a beat, “Ross.” The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.

Antony Gormley:

It's about people coming together to do something extraordinary and unpredictable. It could be tragic but it could also be funny.

Tino Seghal:

Attention is the material I work with.

Tomas Saraceno:

Like Tarkovsky was always saying, “I will only give you 50 percent, the other 50 percent you have to build it by yourself.” Without your imagination we will not do anything.

Ann Hamilton:

No two voices are alike. No event is ever the same. Each intersection in this project is both made and found. All making is an act of attention and attention is an act of recognition and recognition is the something happening that is thought itself… We attend the presence of the tactile and perhaps most important—we attend to each other. If on a swing, we are alone, we are together in a field…. Our crossings, with its motions, sounds, and textures, is a weaving, is a social act.

Holland Cotter:

Joint production among parties of equal standing … scrambles existing aesthetic formulas. It may undermine the cult of the artist as media star, dislodge the supremacy of the precious object and unsettle the economic structures that make the art world a mirror image of the inequities of American culture at large.

Swoon: Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, 2008

Theaster Gates:

Joint production among parties of equal standing … scrambles existing aesthetic formulas. It may undermine the cult of the artist as media star, dislodge the supremacy of the precious object and unsettle the economic structures that make the art world a mirror image of the inequities of American culture at large.

Justin Lowe / Jonah Freeman:

The viewer might not be sure if these are a Duchampian trick [referring to the artist’s 1946-66 Etant donnes] or if there really is a larger world behind them.

Nicolas Bourriaud:

Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.