In 2010, Marina Abramović sat silently at MoMA while visitors queued for hours to sit across from her. The Artist Is Present was hailed as a triumph of participatory art. But as critics later noted, the museum leveraged thousands of hours of unpaid emotional labor from visitors whose contributions made the piece culturally significant—while Abramović alone received credit for the work.

This tension sits at the heart of contemporary participatory practice. Since the 1990s, interactive art has promised to democratize the gallery experience, transforming passive viewers into active co-creators. The rhetoric is seductive: participation as liberation, engagement as empowerment, collaboration as critique of artistic hierarchies.

Yet something more complicated often unfolds. Visitors find themselves conscripted into performances they didn't fully consent to, pressured to contribute labor that enriches institutions, or placed in ethically compromised positions designed to make them uncomfortable. When does the invitation to participate become a demand? When does interactive art stop serving its audience and start extracting from them?

Consider Santiago Sierra's controversial practice of paying marginalized workers to perform degrading tasks in galleries. Viewers who encounter these works become implicated in exploitation simply by watching. There's no opt-out that preserves innocence—even leaving validates the system by demonstrating its power to disturb.

This strategy of manufactured complicity has become a favored tool in socially engaged practice. Artists construct scenarios where audiences must choose between morally compromised options, then frame the discomfort as consciousness-raising. The problem is that genuine consent requires meaningful alternatives.

When Christoph Schlingensief placed asylum seekers in a container and invited the public to vote on who would be deported, viewers faced a false binary: participate in a cruel game or refuse and let others determine outcomes. The work was effective critique—but it achieved this by denying visitors any ethical ground to stand on.

The most troubling participatory works operate through what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the stultifying relationship: they position the artist as enlightened provocateur while treating audiences as raw material requiring activation. True emancipation, Rancière argues, would acknowledge that viewers already possess critical intelligence. Instead, much participatory art assumes audiences need to be trapped into awareness.

Takeaway

Ethical participation requires genuine choice. When an artwork manufactures your complicity by eliminating alternatives, it's not inviting engagement—it's staging your conscription.

When Tino Sehgal creates his 'constructed situations'—live encounters between trained performers and museum visitors—he explicitly prohibits documentation. The experiences exist only in memory. Yet Sehgal sells these pieces to major institutions for substantial sums. The visitors whose spontaneous responses constitute half the encounter receive nothing.

This extraction model pervades interactive practice. Felix Gonzalez-Torres invited viewers to take candies from his installations, framing the act as communion and gift. Beautiful—but also a system where audiences perform the labor of dispersal that completes the work's meaning while the artist's estate collects value from the concept.

The digital sphere has intensified these dynamics. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's interactive installations harvest biometric data from participants—heartbeats, breaths, movements—transforming bodies into input streams. Visitors become content generators for works they can't own, their biological signatures feeding systems that circulate in a market from which they're excluded.

Claire Bishop's influential critique of relational aesthetics identified this problem two decades ago: participatory art often reproduces the very inequalities it claims to challenge. When artists receive credit and compensation for orchestrating contributions from unpaid publics, the supposedly democratizing gesture becomes another form of value extraction—creative labor laundered through the rhetoric of collaboration.

Takeaway

Ask who benefits materially from your participation. If your contribution is essential to the work's meaning or market value, you're not just a viewer—you're an uncredited collaborator performing unpaid labor.

None of this means participatory art is inherently exploitative. Suzanne Lacy's community-based projects genuinely distribute authorship. Theaster Gates's Rebuild Foundation creates lasting infrastructure in underserved neighborhoods. The question isn't whether to participate, but how to participate critically.

Start by interrogating the invitation itself. What are you being asked to do? Who designed this interaction, and what do they gain from your involvement? Is your contribution credited, and does credit matter in this context? These questions don't require cynicism—they require the same critical attention we bring to any cultural object.

Consider your own agency within the work's structure. Can you modify the terms of engagement? What happens if you refuse, subvert, or exceed the expected participation? Some of the most interesting moments in interactive art occur when audiences push back, revealing the work's assumptions about what they should do and think.

Finally, reflect on the labor dynamics at play. Are you being asked to produce content, data, or emotional energy? Where does that contribution go? This isn't about demanding payment—it's about recognizing that participatory frameworks often obscure genuine power relationships beneath the feel-good language of collaboration. Understanding your position doesn't diminish the experience; it deepens it.

Takeaway

Critical participation means engaging fully while remaining aware of the structures shaping your involvement. The best interactive art rewards this doubled attention—being present in the experience while questioning its terms.

Participatory art at its best creates genuine encounters—moments of connection, provocation, and shared meaning-making that traditional gallery experiences cannot achieve. The form's potential remains profound.

But potential and practice often diverge. As institutions increasingly favor interactive programming for its engagement metrics and Instagram-ready moments, the pressure to manufacture participation intensifies. Audiences deserve frameworks for navigating these invitations thoughtfully.

The goal isn't suspicion but discernment. Enter the interactive installation. Accept the invitation. But carry with you the understanding that participation is never neutral—it's a relationship with terms worth examining.