Citation

Scanlan J. Artforum Int. 2005; 43(10): 123.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Artforum International)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

Recently the town of Drachten, Holland, adopted an approach to traffic safety that not only defies conventional wisdom but is eerily similar to relational aesthetics: The town square has been stripped of all directional signs and road markings, the curbs flattened, and the entire traffic area paved in identical stones. Every day, a steady stream of cars, buses, delivery trucks, bicycles, and pedestrians there engage in an open-ended negotiation of what should happen next. With no infrastructure telling them what to do, Drachten drivers and pedestrians actually have to pay attention to what they are doing as well as anticipate what everyone else might do. Hans Monderman, the traffic engineer responsible for the design, readily admits that his scheme works only when its participants share a common sense of ethics and the group conveys that invisible code of conduct to any initiates who enter the square. In other words, peer pressure. Or as Monderman explains it: "This is social space, so when Grandma is coming, you stop, because that's what normal, courteous human beings do."

Peer pressure is effective because it uses one of our most basic fears-public humiliation-as a built-in mechanism for controlling behavior. It works in public contexts because there is a consensus that the benefits of public safety, decency, and cooperation are of greater concern than the repression of individual action or speech. The same is true for relational aesthetics. Whether explicitly or not, a majority of its participants have agreed that a shared (and almost certain) mediocrity was preferable to the risk of aberrant behavior. Peer pressure might produce a safer town square or a prosperous magnet school, but it makes for rather timid art. By contrast, art should be a place where we can "kill Grandma" and, rather than call an ambulance or the moral authorities, stand around and talk about what it means.