conversation as medium

I understand conversation art to be a shift in focus from within the gallery space to the outside world using materials of dialogue and exchange. Stemming from community, public and performance art, conversation artists initiate social interactions, creating ‘a “concrete intervention” in which traditional art materials of marble, canvas, or pigment (was) replaced by “sociopolitical relationships”.’ The reader by Grant H. Kester compares the shift from object based art to the relational operation of conversation art, to the shift Dadaists created when breaking free from accepted mainstream conventions by placing objects/images/text in juxtaposing contexts. Impressionisms demise of neoclassicism is another example used by the author. While I realise that there are many differences, as well as the mentioned similarities, between conversational art and modernist practices, I do wonder whether conversational art, in its endeavor for “new” actually calls for its end, like transcendent modernist practices. One theory of abstract painting is that is it nihilistically worked from beginning to end, towards its death as everything that operates on a linear timeline must eventually do. Could it be that conversation art, while perhaps not a movement itself, like these modernist movements, attempts to break the previous mode of accepted thought in relation to art and in doing so begins an ephemeral life? I used the word death loosely, I’m not suggesting that conversation and relationships will cease to exist, but, like painting, may be worked through to a conclusion (though considering the very technological format of this forum perhaps technology is having this effect already). What implications would the death of conversation and human relationships as an artistic medium have on art and society?

Another question I have is in regards to the author’s suggestion that the socio political/activist qualities of the artworks can be distinguished from the art itself and that this is essentially what makes it art rather than just social activism. I have trouble believing one factor can be distinguished from the other. What does the work consist of other than the social interaction of the communities included? Why are we so focused as defining something as art at all? While I sound very cynical about all this I really do think that this kind of art/life is a positive, active thing worth exploring.