Based on the title of W. Benjamin's inspiring essay, and after reading some of it's follow ups, I think that these might point to an axiom that art produces work - or that artistic process and practices have a definable outcome in the shape of work/object.
What if the work is by the "audience" and the art remains in the process and practice that assists what in this case is inevitable - works?
This might sound like a proposition from situationist and fluxus handbooks - but the historical fact tells a different story. The historical fact tells a story of participation in events, actions, happenings, installations, performances, games, discussions, walks, parties and workshops - all of which encapsulate works and place the artist/s in the centre of the work. This, I think, is partially because the activities themselves are being produced as objects, as end products.
What if art processes and practices are infact cultural technologies? What if, for example, the aesthetics of power, the aesthetics of tension, the aesthetics of market-economy which arguably drive most art worlds - are examples of the very technologies, and indeed effects, that art could be?
If aesthetics, which-ever kind they might be, are to be perceived as technological processes we operate with on the cultural sphere - the kind of stuff we allow ourselves to perceive culturally, then the people formerly known as "audience" are surely the practitioners..
As a simple example, maybe we can use a urinal... One might argue that its a work of art once its in the context of what we understand/perceive as art. Add a signature, place it upside down in a gallery - and don't piss in it.. (a reference to the pissing in Duchamp's urinal at the Tate..)
The aesthetics lesson comes with a group of school kids who check the urinal and wonder what's the fuss is all about. One can tell them "hey! this stuff is like changing the expected order of things to make a funny story. Like having a giant elephant in your bedroom.. Because we are not used to have giant elephants in the bedroom, we find this idea kind of funny and can produce meanings with it. Its' because we changed the frame of reference, the context of what we are used to." A primer for contextual aesthetics..
This can allow some of the kids to perceive life contextually, in that sense, I think of the aesthetics as a cultural technology. No one can predict what these kids might do with this, just like any other technology.
However, I think that placing the kids in the role of audience was in itself an act of power aesthetics. Arguably, the kids who did get the idea, are likely to fetishise the object that "opened their eyes" - hence increasing its market value.
What is the work of audience? An audience is the body that both pays the money and enthuse the cultivation of art works. Like buying a product for its logo, and wearing it - hence in effect, advertising it. Isn't it like the slave that feels free?
How can this work evolve into a fair practice?
What might be fair for me, doesn't have to be fair for you - which is where, I think, the ideas of democracy come in. I say democracy rather than choice, because choice is about an economy of finite products in space-time - and democracy is about an economy of evolution in space-time. I might choose to buy a certain product, or into a certain service - but after I made that choice, the dice have rolled and I have to live with that. Because I can only do one thing in one particular place at one particular time.
Democracy, is about being able to evolve as a group, society, and individuals - hence making a choice is not a finite act - but an act of taking an interest in a process. Hence, it should enable you an input into every stage and element of that process - both as an individual and as a society.
That is why the work of art, as an object, is inevitably, in my mind, against the democratic process. Its the work of audience, the process, in the time period, each one gives to art - the age of art - that is the challenge...
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