Contemporary Art's ‘Urban Question’ and Practices of Experimentation

Abstract

Artists have become exemplary urban advocates, agitators and problemsolvers, but how do we contextualize these actions alongside a contemporary moment that treats urbanization as one of our most powerful collective narratives? As the city becomes a strategic site within neoliberal policy agendas and activist interventions alike, it is timely to reconsider contemporary art's ‘urban question’ (Castells). First, this article argues that we must return to the central urban question that animates art's diverse undertakings: the city as the concentration of myriad inequalities. Second, we must better attend to the strengths and risks of art's modes of response. Art's urban practices can reproduce and reinvent the dominant urban order; they can realize the city as surface and depth, and they can work with and against hegemonic cultural globalization. This article presents three concepts (ambivalent urbanism, thick urbanism and soft solidarity) to account for the critical labour of contemporary art. Finally, it turns to expansive urbanization and the future of art under a planetary urbanism that challenges our contemporary intervention toolkit.