But there was one ramshackle piece of relational art that I thought really did have enormous potential: Occupy Melbourne. Artists were involved in this movement both here and internationally; overseas, the symbolic gesture attracted charismatic speakers. In Australia, the reaction was incurious, philistine and brutal; but in New York, the theorist Slavoj Zizek spoke eloquently about the point of Occupy Wall Street: ”We are allowed to think about alternatives,” he said. If art could make space for that to happen, it’s performing a valuable function and a good year’s work.
Robert Nelson in The Age: Reflecting on art’s paradoxes.
