In his critical reassessment of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, Stewart Martin unveils the profound contradictions embedded in the claim that art, by reorienting itself toward interpersonal relations rather than discrete objects, might escape the commodified structures of capitalist society; while Bourriaud celebrates the ephemeral and convivial experiences generated by artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija or Pierre Huyghe as the foundation of a new micro-political art form, Martin asserts that this very celebration naively fetishises “the social”, mistaking an idealised communal exchange for a true rupture with commodity logic; relational artworks, in their seeming resistance to objecthood, may in fact conceal their full complicity in the aestheticisation of capitalist interaction, offering free soup, collaborative performances, or participatory installations that echo the corporate rhetoric of “user experience” and “customer relations” rather than dismantling them; this is most evident in the critique of projects such as Vanessa Beecroft’s staged femininities or Tiravanija’s gallery-cooked meals, whose supposed social emancipation unfolds within the very circuits of market legitimation and institutional commodification, and is even further deconstructed in Santiago Sierra’s confrontational performances, where the raw exploitation of labour under capitalism is rendered visible, not avoided; Martin proposes that Adorno’s dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy, rather than Bourriaud’s utopian immediacy, offers a more rigorous critical apparatus, where art’s commodified nature becomes the site of resistance through its reflexive exposure rather than its disavowal; thus, the relational project—far from inaugurating an art “beyond exchange”—may rehearse, in aesthetic form, the very capitalist structures it seeks to evade, and its true critical potential lies only in recognising and foregrounding that ambivalent complicity rather than denying it outright. Martin, S. (2007) Critique of Relational Aesthetics. Third Text, 21(4), pp. 369–386. doi:10.1080/09528820701433323
