What roles does a work of art play in society today? Is the purpose of art to provide pleasure, access the subjectivity of the artist, change society, or to provide a new mode of proposing ideas? Rather than seeing art as a subjective practice—one unassailable by the demands of culture or society—Charles Gaines’s lecture at Otis College of Art and Design for the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art proposed that art needs to be reimagined as a cultural practice in order to be fully relevant for today’s political and social climate.
