This short essay frames a sequence of challenges posed by art colectives to art criticism, challenges that often hide in plain sight.
It focuses on why histroians and theorists have tended to obsess over the artificial identity that each collective makes and re-makes every time its members work together in the name of art, which distinguishes collective practice from artist-to-artist collaboration and from participatory modes of art-making:
"By collapsing what 'the artist' is and what 'the artist' does – in the sense that an art collective constantly remakes itself through production in a more extreme way than any individual can perform their identity, no matter how fluid – art collectives inevitably remake their own identity, their form of collectivity, as an artistic act."
Challenging that obsession, it explores some theoretical ways of better understanding that, "Whilst art collectives do re-make themselves they also make things... They compose their own formation (collectivities) as well as forms (artworks) that can work without them."
