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  • What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, by Tom Finkelpearl
  • Andrea Baldini
What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, by Tom Finkelpearl. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013, 398pp., 91 b&w illus., $99.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Tom Finkelpearl is a unique figure in contemporary art. He is the executive director of the Queens Museum of Art. However, for decades, he has been a passionate advocate of unconventional artistic practices that have been flourishing outside the boundaries of the mainstream circuit of museums, biennales, art fairs, galleries, and art schools. In recognition of his involvement in promoting nontraditional forms of art, Public Art Dialogue, one of the most important associations devoted to public art, has recently awarded Finkelpearl their 2015 prize.

What We Made follows in the footsteps of Finkelpearl’s previous book, Dialogues in Public Art (MIT Press, 2011). With that book, Finkelpearl contributed to establishing public art as a subject of academic discussion and inaugurated a new genre of scholarly writing about the arts. Such a genre explores a subject primarily through a series of dialogues and conversations between a heterogeneous group of individuals. What We Made adopts the same format. It expands the research of Dialogues in Public Art by examining what appears as a subgenre of public art, that is, socially cooperative art.

The range of opinions aired in the conversations is impressive, making the book both engaging and deeply rooted in the different scholarly debates addressing cooperative art. Thanks to its interdisciplinary nature and academic rigor, this book would appeal to many readers including, among others, those with an interest in aesthetics and philosophy of art, art history and criticism, sociology of art, education, and public policy. It is of particular interest for those interested in aesthetic education since, as Finkel-pearl highlights in his introduction, there is an essential link between “participatory art and progressive education, a theme that runs throughout the project in this [Finkelpearl’s] book” (22).

For Finkelpearl, the category of cooperative art intends “to describe a spectrum of activity” (4), rather than individuate a medium-specific artistic practice of clear boundaries. The examples of cooperative art that the book discusses, in effect, include distinctly diverse projects. The common denominator linking projects of cooperative art is their “antispectatorial character” (343). “Cooperative art,” Finkelpearl writes, “is created through shared action, not by active artists for inactive spectators” (ibid.).

Because of their antispectatorial character, Finkelpearl argues, projects of cooperative art expose the limitations of dominant theories of art and open up new possibilities for meaningful interactions between creativity, the arts, and the other domains [End Page 120] of human action and life. For what pertains to its negative side, the main critical target of the book is “esthetic ‘individualism’” (345). Esthetic individualism is the view that art production and appreciation are necessarily individual efforts performed in isolation from others. Throughout the chapters, Finkelpearl and other discussants attack esthetic individualism by tackling three ideas associated with such a view: the artist as lone creator (Chapters 8, 9, and 10); the curator as the only one responsible for arranging the content of an exhibition (Chapter 3); and the appreciator as the solitary viewer contemplating an artwork in isolation from its sociopolitical context (Chapter 4).

By building on its critique of esthetic individualism, the book’s constructive aim is to develop a theoretical framework for cooperative art, which appears in its systematic form in the concluding chapter. Such an account wants to capture how, thanks to their collective and participatory nature, projects of cooperative art “re-integrate art into society as cultural expression rather than as strictly personal gesture” (98). As a consequence of reintegrating art into society, the book shows us that cooperative art challenges artistic autonomy, imbuing its exemplars with a multiplicity of nonaesthetic values. While touching on a multiplicity of those values, the analysis focuses on the following ones: educational (Chapters 2 and 7), sociopolitical (Chapter 8), spiritual (Chapter 10), and urban values (Chapters 5, 6, and 9).

What We Made opens up with an introduction written by Finkelpearl. Here, he traces the origins of socially cooperative art in the United States, paying attention...

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