Even Better than the Real Thing: Economies of ontological authenticity in socially engaged art practice

In this essay the idea of social practice as a mode of cultural philanthropy is rejected in favour of a different form of symbolic exchange between social practice and the art world predicated on proximity to the real. Crystallized by the refugee crisis, Slavoj Ziek has noted the polarization of politics in Europe. His critique of the liberal humanist appeal to our moral generosity is deployed as a point of departure for understanding this problem of the economy of attention and engagement with contemporary emergencies. The principle of generosity in philanthropy is critiqued as a whimsical corrective within the neoliberal imaginary. Art in the age of emergency is explored via an examination of the duty of art museums, from their original duty of explanation to their current imperative to function at the level of transforming subjectivity. Hito Steyerl notes a shift in the performative duties of the artist in the museum, a persistent requirement for their presence. The implications of that preoccupation with presence is explored for the field of social practice. Economies of visibility that govern the sight lines of social practice within this paradigm are analysed. An experience drawn from the collaborative practice of Vagabond Reviews is introduced, drawing attention to an ontological economy that organizes the mode of symbolic exchange between the situated art of social practice and the art academy. Social practice is complicated by the way in which it increasingly straddles an ontological corridor between sites of practice in the real on a one-to-one scale and the the gallery-based art world. Finally, it is suggested that the field of contemporary art is trying to get away from itself, enacting its own ontological self-cancellation by dissolving into the real.