Leshinsky includes an article originally published in Artforum from 2006, Claire Bishop’s “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents”. It’s appropriate that this article is itself a kind of dialogue, not only between the various art practices outlined by Bishop, but between her and another critic, Grant Kester. Their discussion of the relative importance of aesthetics, ethics, and engagement in art mirrors in many ways the conversation surrounding the BDC’s work.

But things are not so easy here, Bishop’s call for a more precise set of criteria to evaluate the success or failure of service-based art is more nuanced than the simple opposition that a brief skim of her article would appear to indicate. She is calling for even more dialogue between “aesthetes”, and “activists”, a dialogue that would only enrich and broaden the traditional disciplinary boundaries of art and practice:

“The former, at their most extreme, would condemn us to a world of irrelevant painting and sculpture, while the latter have a tendency to self-marginalize to the point of inadvertantly reinforcing art’s autonomy … Is there a ground on which the two sides can meet?”

I was reminded again of this tension between aesthetics and engagement, by the rediscovery of another classic piece of art criticsism: Rosalind Krauss’ essay on The Grid (pdf). Just as Bishop is using an survey of service-based art practices to look for more aesthetic criteria, Krauss is using an examination of that most abstract and formal devices, the grid, to bring the broader context of psychology, optics, and social history into a conversation about aesthetics.