From Relational Aesthetics to Aesthetic Relations: On the Value of Interaction in Contemporary Art

When Nicolas Bourriaud published his seminal text Relational Aesthetics in 1998, his thesis emerged as a necessary departure from the object-based and self-referential forms of 1980s art. The artwork was no longer conceived as a closed entity, but as a generative device for human relationships, capable of opening up a space of interaction that itself became an aesthetic material. In this sense, Bourriaud marked a rupture: the artwork no longer merely produced forms, but generated situations, experiences, and networks.

More than twenty-five years later, the landscape has radically changed. Relationships are no longer confined to the limited space of an exhibition or public intervention, but extend, project, and sediment within the hyperconnected ecosystem we call social media. Whereas in Bourriaud’s model, interaction was still conceived as a contained event, today it takes the form of a permanent, incessant flow, archived and instantly retrievable. It is within this shift that the need arises to speak not only of relational aesthetics, but of a true social aesthetics.

The difference is not merely terminological but ontological. While relational aesthetics was tied to a situational conception of art, the artwork as a temporary catalyst for encounters, contemporary social aesthetics is grounded in the diffuse historicity of interactions. Every comment, like, and share is no longer an ephemeral residue, but a trace that becomes part of the work’s critical genealogy. A paradox thus emerges: what was once understood as fleeting, marginal, even negligible, now becomes the primary material through which an artwork is received, discussed, and even evaluated.

At this point, a theoretical shift is required. It is not just a matter of acknowledging that social media have transformed how artworks circulate, but of understanding that digital interactions have assumed an aesthetic centrality. They no longer constitute a secondary frame of reception, but rather the true space in which the artwork takes shape, becomes exposed to processes of collective interpretation, and is historicized through algorithmic archiving.

In this sense, to speak of social aesthetics means to interrogate the current condition of contemporary art in light of a structural transformation: from the artwork as event to the platform, from situated interaction to infinite relation, from the aesthetics of proximity to the aesthetics of connection.