Relational-ism

I came across this video by Ben Lewis made in 2004.  He is on a journey to find out whether or not Relational Aesthetics is a new 'ism'....... Relationalism.  At times the film is funny, amusing, and frustrating.  The best part is when he is talking to Gavin Brown from Gavin Brown's Enterprise (Gallery in NY that represents  Rirkrit Tiravanija).  Here is the LINK and below is an excerpt from the interview about the film.

BBC Four: So, is Relational Art a new movement?
Ben Lewis: I don't know if it is a new movement or not, I want the viewer to tell me. I suppose that the film established that it was a new movement in an ironic sort of way, but it didn't seal off that argument and in fact many people will be left wondering what all these artists have in common.

BBC Four: What suggests that they are a movement?
BL: Well they know each other, they're interested in art that has a kind of purpose and in some ways it's very post-Modernist (not Postmodernist) art. If you looked at everything and asked what it had in common they make something that is used. Whether it's Philippe Parreno's rather pretentious light on the gallery floor, the lamps, which will probably end up on some excessively wealthy collector's sidetable near to the tiger skin; or whether it's those phone boxes by Elmgreen and Dragset where you use the exhibit and then become aware of what poor people have to do.

BBC Four: A lot of them see to be quite political in their concerns, certainly anti-capitalist. 
BL: Yeah, I'd say all their work was informed by a crushingly na•ve political viewpoint that could only have been nurtured in the bubble of an art school. I think the misfortune of that kind of art is that it's politically imbecilic, and on an intellectual level they're still living off the arguments of the Frankfurt school - Adorno and Horkheimer - from the Sixties. They argued that we are all slaves to something called dominant ideology; this bourgeois thing that was constructing our way of thinking for us, our politics and our society. 

Whereas the world we live in today is one that actually offers us much more choice to resist, rebel and construct our own community and I don't think any of the artists in that programme have really taken that on board. The weakness of the art to me is that it is quite patronising actually. They're trying to tell me something that I disagree with and they're saying "Because we're artists we know better", and I think that's one of the Modernist art myths they haven't managed to get rid of.