The New Art of Being Amateur: Distance as Participation

This article discusses the recent surge and interest in what may be described as ‘amateur’ art, relating it to other amateur practices in different fields. These works would not fit into a narrative of relational aesthetics; rather, they appear closer to a Rancierean act of archive excavation into forms of expression that fall outside professional realms. The text interrogates how they stand in relation to the flow of ‘official’ culture by an exploration of the themes of participation and equality. The amateur works at a professional level yet could be even more effective in terms of productivity and innovation, not by appropriating the professional space but precisely by distancing his or her work from it. This key notion of a ‘distance’ is discussed with reference to Boris Groys’ writings about the equality of images under their factual inequality, in order to establish how amateur practices confirm the territorial differences between different spheres of production yet could engage and potentially disrupt the hierarchy of values that sustain those spheres.