Forms of Participation in Contemporary Art

1. In Modelle partizipatorischer Praxis (Models of participatory practice), 1998, Christian Kravagna proposes a distinction distinction between four different working methods in contemporary art:
a. Working together - criticizes the authority of the artist over the complete production of the work and the passive role of the audience as "active consumer"
b. Interactive art (permits one or more reactions that can influence the appearance of the work without deeply affecting its structure)
c. Collective action - a group of people formulate an idea and then carry it out together
d. Participatory practice - presumes that there is a difference between the producer and receiver but the focus is on the latter, to which a significant part of the development of the work is transferred.
2. According to Alan Brown ("The Five Modes of Arts Participation", January 31, 2000), four modes of participation can be distinguished:
• Inventive Arts Participation - engages the audience in an act of artistic creation that is unique and idiosyncratic.
• Interpretive Arts Participation - a creative act of self-expression that brings alive and adds value to pre-existing works of art.
• Curatorial Arts Participation – a creative act of selecting, organising and collecting art according to one’s own artistic sensibility.
• Observational Arts Participation - encompasses arts experiences motivated by some expectation of value.
• Ambient Arts Participation - experiencing art, consciously or unconsciously, that is not consciously selected.
3. In "The Collaborative Turn"( in Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson (eds), Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices . London: Black Dog Publishing. 2007, p.17), Maria Lind distinguishes among collaborative, cooperative and participatory artistic projects:
"Concepts like collaboration, cooperation, collective action, relationality and participation are used and often confused, although each of them has its own specific connotations. (...) 'Collaboration' is, as the above definition suggests, an open-ended concept, which in principle encompasses all the others. Collaboration becomes an umbrella term for the diverse working methods that require more than one participant. 'Cooperation', on the other hand, emphasises the notion of working together and mutually benefiting from it. Through its stress on solidarity, the word 'collective' gives an echo of working forms within a socialist social system. 'Collective action' refers precisely to acting together while 'interaction' can mean that several people interact with each other as well as that a single individual interacts with, for example, an apparatus by pressing a button. 'Participation' is more widely associated with the creation of a context in which particpants can take part in something that someone else has created but where there are, nevertheless, opportunities to have an impact"
4. Kevin F. McCarthy, Kimberly Jinnett, A new Framework for Building Participation in Arts, Ed. Rand, 2001, p.17 propose the following framwork explaining forms of participations preference:

Entertainment / Fulfillment
Developing Proficiency (self-focused) / Participation through media / Hands-on Participation
Social experience / Attendance (casual) /Attendance (alficionado)