In What We Made, Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields—including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed include the experience of working in public, working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities available with new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. Finkelpearl engages art historians Grant Kester and Claire Bishop in conversation about the challenges of writing critically about this work and the aesthetic status of the dialogical encounter. Finkelpearl also interviews “expert participants” who have worked with artists, the often overlooked co-creators of cooperative art. In his conclusion, Finkelpearl argues that pragmatism offers a useful critical platform for understanding the experiential nature of social cooperation and applies this to a discussion of Houston’s Project Row Houses.

Interviewees: Naomi Beckwith, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Brett Cook, Teddy Cruz, Jay Dykeman, Wendy Ewald, Sondra Farganis, Harrell Fletcher, David Henry, Gregg Horowitz, Grant Kester, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Pedro Lasch, Rick Lowe, Daniel Martinez, Lee Mingwei, Jonah Peretti, Ernesto Pujol, Evan Roth, Ethan Seltzer, and Mark Stern.

Tom Finkelpearl is Executive Director of the Queens Museum of Art. He is the author of Dialogues in Public Art.