From Relational Aesthetics to Aesthetic Relations: On the Value of Interaction in Contemporary Art
When Nicolas Bourriaud published his seminal text Relational Aesthetics in 1998, his thesis emerged as a necessary departure from the object-based and self-referential forms of 1980s art. The artwork was no longer conceived as a closed entity, but as a generative device for human relationships, capable of opening up a space of interaction that itself became an aesthetic material. In this sense, Bourriaud marked a rupture: the artwork no longer merely produced forms, but generated situations, experiences, and networks.
More than twenty-five years later, the landscape has radically changed. Relationships are no longer confined to the limited space of an exhibition or public intervention, but extend, project, and sediment within the hyperconnected ecosystem we call social media. Whereas in Bourriaud’s model, interaction was still conceived as a contained event, today it takes the form of a permanent, incessant flow, archived and instantly retrievable. It is within this shift that the need arises to speak not only of relational aesthetics, but of a true social aesthetics.
The difference is not merely terminological but ontological. While relational aesthetics was tied to a situational conception of art, the artwork as a temporary catalyst for encounters, contemporary social aesthetics is grounded in the diffuse historicity of interactions. Every comment, like, and share is no longer an ephemeral residue, but a trace that becomes part of the work’s critical genealogy. A paradox thus emerges: what was once understood as fleeting, marginal, even negligible, now becomes the primary material through which an artwork is received, discussed, and even evaluated.
At this point, a theoretical shift is required. It is not just a matter of acknowledging that social media have transformed how artworks circulate, but of understanding that digital interactions have assumed an aesthetic centrality. They no longer constitute a secondary frame of reception, but rather the true space in which the artwork takes shape, becomes exposed to processes of collective interpretation, and is historicized through algorithmic archiving.
In this sense, to speak of social aesthetics means to interrogate the current condition of contemporary art in light of a structural transformation: from the artwork as event to the platform, from situated interaction to infinite relation, from the aesthetics of proximity to the aesthetics of connection.
The Space of the Artwork as an Infrastructure of Relations
If relational aesthetics had conceived the exhibition space as the privileged context in which relationships took shape, an environment set up by the artist to activate encounters, dialogues, and temporary coexistence, today that very concept of space must be rethought in light of digital infrastructures. While the exhibition remains a central device, it is no longer the exclusive site of relationality, as it now extends, expands, and is redefined within the platform.
This shift is not neutral. Whereas physical space is characterized by co-presence, simultaneity, and the embodied nature of interaction, digital space introduces different logics: asynchrony, reproducibility, and traceability. Here, the artwork is not merely seen, but is constantly reactivated through the actions of users who comment, share, tag, and quote. Its aesthetic value lies in the network of relationships that the platform enables and, above all, archives.
This produces a layering effect. Once an artwork enters the digital circuit, it is no longer just a “visual text,” but becomes a relational infrastructure, a node around which interactions, debates, conflicts, and memories converge. The image of the artwork serves as a catalyst, but its critical impact is measured by its ability to generate and sustain discourse, producing archives of reactions that continually redefine its meaning.
It is not a matter of establishing a dichotomy between physical and digital space, but of recognizing that the contemporary artwork moves within a hybrid condition. The white cube, with its institutional aura, and the feed, with its apparent horizontality, no longer stand in vertical opposition but form two complementary layers of a single ecosystem. The artwork is called to exist in both dimensions, constantly translating itself from a logic of proximity to a logic of connection.
From this perspective, the artist is no longer merely a producer of objects or events, but becomes the architect of complex relational spaces, where form is intertwined with infrastructure. The contemporary artwork is no longer just what happens in the physical space, but what continues to happen as that space extends and multiplies across digital networks.
The Comment as an Aesthetic Gesture
Among all the micro-interactions that populate digital space, the comment perhaps represents the most radical transformation in the relationship between artwork and audience. While the like functions as a minimal signal, a numerical pulse measuring the circulation of the work, the comment introduces a discursive dimension. It adds words, context, judgment, and sometimes even emotion. It is a gesture that positions itself at the margins of the work, yet today tends to invade its center, influencing its reception and at times even its critical fate.
Artistic tradition has often underestimated the margins. Reviews, marginal notes, and viewer diaries were seen as secondary apparatuses, accessories to the main body of the work. In the social media regime, this hierarchy is reversed: the margin becomes the body, the periphery becomes substance. A work can gain resonance not so much through its formal presence, but through the density, quality, or even aggressiveness of the comments it generates.
This shift opens two complementary scenarios. On one hand, the comment as an autonomous aesthetic gesture, a contribution that transforms the work into an open device, continuously rewritten by the public. Just think of artistic practices that have directly integrated comments as material, from Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections (2014) to more recent forms of social feed appropriation. On the other hand, the comment as a marker of value, used by algorithms and platforms to determine the visibility and circulation of the work itself.
In both cases, what emerges is a new form of participatory aesthetics, in which the distinction between author and audience is further weakened. The work, in its specific image, is no longer merely a generator of relations, but becomes a site of collective writing, a polyphonic text in which the artist no longer holds the final word. Interaction is therefore not mere “reception,” but aesthetic co-production.
Naturally, this dynamic raises crucial questions: to what extent can we speak of aesthetic value, rather than just social noise? What is the threshold that separates the comment as critical contribution from the comment as impulsive and superficial reaction? And further, what new forms of critical authority are emerging when the historicization of a work takes place through archives of public, often anonymous and unfiltered interactions?
These questions do not seek definitive answers, but point to what is at stake: recognizing that the comment, today, is no longer an accessory to the artwork, but one of its main aesthetic battlegrounds.
Archiving the Ephemeral: The Historicity of Micro-Interactions
One of the most significant paradoxes of the contemporary aesthetic condition concerns the fate of the ephemeral. Within the framework of relational aesthetics, interaction was conceived as a situated, fragile, and unrepeatable event—its value lay in its contingency, in the limited temporality of the encounter. With the rise of social media, this logic has been reversed: what appears ephemeral—a like, a comment, a share—becomes instead a trace, a document, an archive. Yes, we can dare to use that word.
Every micro-interaction is in fact recorded, stored, and made available by infrastructures that operate as global memory devices. The feed is not only a flow, but also an archive. And it is precisely in this automatic, unfiltered accumulation that a new field of historicity opens up. The artwork is no longer documented solely through catalogues or reviews, but through a multitude of interactive fragments that compose a chaotic mosaic of its reception.
This dynamic introduces a radical transformation in the construction of value. Whereas in the past the historicity of a work was entrusted to museums, critics, or publishing institutions, today it is distributed, diffused, disseminated across digital archives that belong as much to users as to algorithms. As a result, the memory of the work is no longer univocal, but polyphonic and layered, composed of conflicting comments, emotional reactions, and micro-narratives that coexist without hierarchy.
This condition is not without ambiguity. On one hand, it democratizes the historicization of art, including voices and perspectives that would traditionally have remained excluded. On the other hand, it risks generating archival noise, where the quantity of interactions outweighs their quality, producing a memory that is overloaded yet insufficiently discerning.
In any case, what clearly emerges is that contemporary artworks are now inscribed in a new documentary regime: that of archived micro-interactions. Not just photographs, reviews, or catalogues, but networks of comments, hashtags, links, and reposts now constitute the historical apparatus through which the work will be remembered, studied, and inevitably judged.
In this sense, contemporary art inhabits a new tension: on one side, the precariousness of its rapid and volatile consumption, and on the other, the unexpected solidity of the traces left by each interaction. It is precisely in this tension between transience and memory that the historicity of the artwork is defined today.
Towards a Theory of Social Aesthetics
If relational aesthetics recognized the urgency of identifying interaction as the vital core of contemporary art, today we are faced with the need for a conceptual update. It is no longer sufficient to speak of relationships activated within the exhibition space, we must understand how digital platforms have radically transformed the very nature of interaction, elevating it to a primary aesthetic condition.
Social aesthetics, as we will refer to it for convenience in this article, does not merely describe the art that circulates on social media, but identifies in the relational processes generated, archived, and re-elaborated by platforms the new ground of aesthetic production. And this, perhaps, is the truly new and interesting part. Here, the artwork is never isolated, it always exists in relation to a flow of interactions that redefine its meaning in real time. Every image, every post, every artistic intervention is already inscribed within a network of comments, shares, and digital memories that constitute its true field of existence.
This condition entails a redefinition of the roles of both artist and audience. The artist is no longer just a creator of forms, but an architect of relational ecologies, capable of designing not only the work itself but also the types of interactions it will be able to activate. The audience, in turn, is never merely a passive spectator, but an actual co-author, part of a collective writing that sediments as memory and critical value.
Social aesthetics thus marks the transition from an aesthetics of proximity, based on direct encounter, to an aesthetics of connection, in which distance does not negate the relationship but amplifies it, multiplies it, archives it. The challenge for contemporary art is not simply to inhabit this space, but to preserve its complexity, avoiding a reduction of interaction to pure algorithmic data, to a mere engagement metric.
For this reason, the theoretical task ahead is not to naively celebrate the centrality of social media, but to develop critical tools capable of distinguishing between interaction as noise and interaction as aesthetic gesture. Only then will it be possible to restore to art its function as a reflective and generative space, even within the whirlwind of digital platforms.
In this perspective, social aesthetics, rather than being imagined as a mere extension of Bourriaud’s theory, should be understood, quite radically, as a surpassing of it, a new critical lens through which to read the present, where the relationship is no longer a contained event, but a permanent flow, no longer an ephemeral circumstance, but a shared archive.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
You may also like
Fakewhale in dialogue with Tick Tack
“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” – Ray Cummings At Fakewhale
Giuseppe Moscatello in Conversation with Fakewhale
Art Producer, Curator, and Co-Founder of Foundry Downtown in Dubai, Giuseppe Moscatello brings over
Programmed Bodies: Contemporary Performance Between Aesthetics and Technological Embodiment
If one tries to access the website www.liminal.contact today, what appears on the blank page of our
