ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by addressing some recent examples of relational and participative art. In spite of the intense debates on these practices, the understanding of the gift as voluntary exchange between equal peers is rarely questioned in the field of art. The “gift” is not only central to anthropology, but also in other worlds of thought, like art, if perhaps in less explicit ways. Relational artworks as gifts would be free, spontaneous, personal, and disinterested events, in opposition to commodification and mass consumption. One of the main ethnographic examples of recursion is computer programming. Artworks have power; but for Gell this power is always bestowed upon them by people with “minds”, whose intentions are distributed in art objects. The new model of management is the “participative society.” In the participative society, the autonomy of different fields of practice has been abolished, to an extent, by the imposition of a model of life and work that is transversal: management.
