ABSTRACT
Today, an experience of a work of art is not necessarily tied to a single object, location, time, or event. Indeed, some works of art can be accessed in multiple ways—in person, online, across multiple versions, or as a complex aggregate of very different materializations and modes of delivery. What then are the new, renewed, and emerging conceptions of artistic production, reception, and circulation? How are they to be understood and experienced in relation to multiple and intersecting temporalities, distributed materializations, digital reproducibility, and the dissolution of physical space? Unlike the assertions of aesthetic autonomy that prevailed in key twentieth-century art, much art in the twenty-first century is perhaps more concerned with negotiating relationships and testing spatial and temporal boundaries. Consequently, many core twentieth-century contestations pertaining to art’s identity, value, and meaning have been recast as increasingly fuzzily demarcated and ambiguously oscillating multiform problems pertaining to art’s situatedness, relationality, and relevance. This chapter seeks to repurpose the twentieth-century problem “what is art?” to consider where and when art is understood, situated in the twenty-first century.
