Art and Theory: What Relationship?

The June 2025 issue of e-flux journal “examines the shifting relationship between theory and art over the past thirty years.”1 The issue’s editorial dispenses with any demonstration of this relationship, because there may be disagreement over when, how, and why art came to operate “under the gaze of theory,” as Boris Groys puts it, but no one questions the reach and scope of the phenomenon itself.2 Or, for that matter, the fact that the relationship cannot be reduced to a question of influence—artists and curators drawing inspiration from theory—but extends, more radically, to the idea that art is itself theory: “To make art has always been to engage … in theoretical practice.”3 The same can be said for exhibitions, which often ask to be seen as arguments unfolded in space—even if this tends to require a little help from press releases, labels, and wall texts: “It is impossible lately to read descriptions of exhibits and events at any given museum, or gallery, or well-meaning nonprofit or alternative space and not be presented parcels of language clogged with catchphrases and sound bites” taken from theoretical sources.4 My aim in this short and deliberately polemical note is to suggest that the relationship between art and theory, while readily acknowledged as central to the arts over however many years, has yet to be studied.

A common tendency in discussions of art’s relationship to theory is to treat it as a block rather than as a set of individuated and specific relationships between this or that artist or curator and this or that theorist or set of concepts. The accounts that emerge at this level are not especially flattering, with the most common characterization of the relationship being that the art world turns theory into a brand: “The fetishization of theory in art spaces” reduces thinkers to “corporate logos or brands.”5 Similarly, we read about how “theory” serves as “good packaging” for artworks and exhibitions, or about the “commodification of theory” and the “misappropriation and distortion of critical theory in the hand of various operational agents” in the arts.6 Jaleh Mansoor, who is clear-eyed but more generous about the possibilities of this relationship, talks about how the art world turns theory into “just another brand,” so that concepts become slogans divorced from “the lived struggle that actualized their emergence.”7 Even Jacques Rancière, who has attributed to “curators and people of the art milieu” the “celebrity” that his work has enjoyed in this century, comments cynically on his—and theory’s—commodification in and by the art world: “There are a whole host of artists and curators who think of only one thing—getting a supposedly hip philosopher for their catalogue.”8

I don’t deny that there is truth to these charges, but I do want to note that Fournier, Stewart, and Aguirre don’t provide even one specific example of the becoming-brand of theory, nor do they bother to describe the processes by which theory is commodified, or to parse out the differences that may exist between those processes. There is likewise no specificity to the charge of “distortion,” and no engagement with the possibility that “distortion” may be an inescapable—possibly even a welcome—element of this relationship. Not so long ago, it was commonly accepted that distortion is part and parcel of every interpretation that is not a one-to-one reconstruction of the source material à la “Funes the Memorius” (whom, Borges notes, could not think). Rancière’s discussion of Roberto Rossellini’s made-for-TV films about philosophers and philosophy is interesting in this context. The first film in that series is about Socrates, and in it Rossellini tries what Rancière describes as a “direct illustration” of Socratic thought onscreen; the result is “a total fiasco.” For the project to work as cinema, he continues, Rossellini realized that he could not illustrate a philosopher’s ideas onscreen; instead, he had to find a way to bring those ideas, “for the benefit of a public whose love is watching films, closer to the body of the philosopher.”9

That is one possibility for how philosophy can exist cinematographically, for how theory can find form in a medium—art, film, etc.—other than itself. Of course, there is no template for how to negotiate the task of doing philosophy (or theory) and “the task of making cinema.”10 A different filmmaker would have arrived at a different solution, giving a different form to the relationship between art and theory. The authors I mentioned above do not pay attention to these differences, or to the effects—beyond branding, which is itself not monolithic, and may in some instances be intentional—that fetishization, distortion, and appropriation produce. But the only way to arrive at a finer, individuated sense of the forms art gives to theory is to move away from the abstractions—Art and Theory—that have governed the discussion in order to focus on specific instances, to look closely at how art-world agents (artist and curators) take up, deploy, read, misread, distort, or commodify concepts. It is in these operations, and in the claims or objects that emerge from them, that the relationship is actualized, and can be studied instead of simply pointed to as a well-established fact. And the first step in that direction is to recognize that all readings—and not just “correct” ones—produce effects. 

This lack of specificity is also noticeable when we turn to more sympathetic readers of the relationship, like Groys. He concedes that theory can function as “propaganda” and “advertising.”11 But he also argues that there is more at stake than fetishization and the hope to stick a “hip” label onto an artwork or show. Theory “was never so central to art as it is now,” Groys writes, because it is no longer clear “what art actually is,” and art-world agents “need theory to explain what they are doing.”12 He doesn’t say why they need theory as oppose to something else, but Mansoor does: “Theory and art have emerged in a condition of co-constitutive tension since art cut the cord from myth.”13 This is an intriguing suggestion, but what matters here is not why theory has been (modern and contemporary) art’s privileged interlocutor, but the fact that, in Groys’s chapter about this issue, he does not discuss how even one artist or curator uses theory to explain “what they are doing.” He speaks at some length about Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, and even Gabriel Tarde, but the one thing he does not do is show how the dialogue with a theorist materialized in this artwork, this exhibition, or this view of “what art actually is.”

A discussion of what arguments—in Marx, Foucault, etc.—are potentially productive for the arts is not the same thing as a study of the relationship itself through a consideration of its embodiment or manifestations. This propensity to recoil from the materiality of the relationship holds for Groys, and also for a paper by Joseph Tanke that seems at first to be pitched against it. Published in 2010, “Why Rancière Now?” begins with Tanke noting that the interest in Rancière’s work in those years was driven primarily by people in the arts. And he wants to figure out why Rancière was being read so assiduously in “art circles”: Why had he become so popular with the “art-world types”—artists, curators, critics, even his own students—that Tanke interacted with on a regular basis at the art college where he was teaching at the time?14 The initial setup leads us to think that the answer to the paper’s titular question will emerge from an analysis of the meeting (we could say: the relationship) between Rancière’s thought and art-world practices. But that is not what happens. The opening pages are there to show what in many ways we already know: that the “relationship between theoretical discourse and artistic practice” has been going strong for a while, and that there is nothing unusual about the art world’s interest in Rancière’s work. Quite the contrary: the real question, given the centrality of that relationship, is why is he “only now being read with any seriousness in art circles?”15

Once Tanke shows that the interest in Rancière is just the most recent instantiation of the art world’s “reliance” on theory, the field of inquiry narrows, and all the reasons he offers in answer to his question are to be found in a close reading of Rancière’s work. The art circles and art-world types invoked in the opening pages disappear to make space for a careful exposition of the organizing principles of Rancière’s aesthetics. “Why Rancière Now?” is a fine paper on Rancière, but it is no way a paper about the relationship between art and theory; as with Groys, that relationship is not studied so much as pointed to and, as with Groys, Tanke privileges one partner in that relationship. But why? As Tanke notes, Artforum in 2007 had devoted an issue to Rancière’s work, and it included essays by Thomas Hirschhorn, Liam Gillik, and Paul Chan, three artists who had been invited specifically to describe why and how Rancière had been important to their artistic practice. But Tanke does not consider what they have to say; indeed, he doesn’t cite a single “art-world type,” not because none was available, but because he doesn’t entertain the idea that the reasons for Rancière’s importance in the arts have to be sought, not only in what he has written, but also—and especially—in the way his words and ideas are taken up, mobilized, and possibly “distorted” by artists, curators, and so forth. Not just in texts—even if that is the simplest place to look—but also in their works. That is precisely what I try to do in a case study about the supposedly all-important role—either formative or interpretative—that Rancière’s work in general, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster in particular, is said to have played in the “educational turn” in contemporary art. In that text, I pit the claims made about Rancière from within the educational turn against the positions that he articulates in his work. My goal in showing the divergence, or the “distortion,” of the letter of Rancière’s text is not to give a philosophy lesson. It is, rather, to show how ideas are understood and mobilized, to map how theoretical concepts circulate and produce effects in the field of artistic creation and curatorial practice.16

Tanke is a philosopher, but the tendency I’m highlighting is likewise visible among art historians and critics. In the several pages of Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells devoted to Hirschhorn’s The Bijlmer-Spinoza Festival, she does not spend any time trying to figure what, if anything, Hirschhorn wants to say about Spinoza, or even what attracted him to that philosopher in particular. That the question—why Spinoza?—never comes up is telling, and perhaps illustrative of how the widespread acceptance of the art and theory relationship can close off what would once have been basic questions: What does Spinoza have to do with this? What does this tell us about Spinoza? Anna Dezeuze’s monograph about Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument is similarly silent on this front.17 Bishop and Dezeuze would perhaps argue, convincingly, that looking at what Hirschhorn has to say about Spinoza and Deleuze (and Gramsci and Bataille, who also got their monuments) is not an interesting angle from which to approach these interventions and tease out what is provocative about them as art. Perhaps their sense is that a deeper engagement with these questions would show nothing more than the commodification that we saw above, with Spinoza reduced to a “hip” brand instead of emerging as a thinker whose ideas inform or are materialized in (beautiful, provocative, banal …) performances, or plastic and spatial forms.

It is not my intention here was to criticize these authors but simply to highlight a tendency common to all of them. They acknowledge the relationship between art and theory, they invoke it to explain a reality (an interest in a philosopher’s work, a monument to another), but they don’t study the relationship as such. We know that it exists, that it has existed for a while, that certain aspersions can be hurled at it (commodification, etc.), but the specifics remain indeterminate. How is Gillick’s Rancière different from Chan’s or Hirschhorn’s? What differentiates the Deleuze from the Gramsci monument? I understand that philosophers like Tanke may not be too interested in how artists have read and used theory; and, by the same token, that art historians may not be interested in working through Spinoza’s Ethics. But it seems to me that moving beyond this impasse—this series of parallel monologues that circle but never quite engage with their putative subject—is the only way to start giving the relationships (plural) specificity and thus substantiate the claim, so oft-repeated, that “art-is-theory,” or that to make art is to engage in “theoretical practice.”