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Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship . By Claire Bishop . London : Verso , 2012. Pp. 390. £19.99/$29.95 Pb.
Claire Bishop's book comes as a timely rejoinder to the popularity of so-called participatory art, which has ballooned since the early 1990s. The diverse field of practice has seen artists variously collaborating, consulting and co-authoring with, and employing, using and exploiting, non-artists in their work. Broadly, this has occurred under the laudable yet elusive banners of dis-alienation, emancipation, education and social change, and, as Bishop convincingly argues, has often set itself up somewhat naively 'against its mythic counterpart, passive spectatorial consumption' (p. 275).
Bishop begins the work by providing a critical and thorough outline of the key terms pertaining to participatory arts practices, before casting...