Alternative Alternatives: Sites and Audiences Outside the Artworld Today

There is a long history of artists bypassing the artworld’s usual settings to present their work on the artists’ own terms. From those who organized the nineteenth-century Salon des Refusés to the twentieth-century earthworks movement, artists’ discontent with the art venues and institutions of their time led them to seek alternative sites outside the artworld or that elude the art market’s financial grasp. Artists’ more recent approaches ranged from the institutional critique to relational aesthetics—all of which were eventually absorbed and even sponsored by museums and other artworld institutions. Artists’ dissatisfaction with artworld conditions nonetheless continues and has widened to include concerns that extend beyond routine sites and commercial demands to consider, too, the nature, diversity, and locations of overlooked or underserved audiences.

This session explores contemporary artists’ experiments with new sites or ways of showing their work, as well as their efforts to reach new audiences. An area of special interest will be those approaches that deliberately sidestep the artworld’s usual ambits. Proposals are invited from artists, critics, and art historians with the aim of fostering a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary discussion that embraces practices as well as criticism and theory illuminating them.