Nicolas Bourriaud

[3] Bourriaud was the Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, an art school in Paris, France, from 2011 to 2015.

[5] In 2014, he was part of the selection committee that chose Giuseppe Penone, Nedko Solakov and Liam Gillick as the winners of the European Central Bank’s international competition for site-specific artworks at its new premises.

);[9] In 2018, he joined a group of arts professionals — among them the artists Christian Boltanski and Jean-Luc Moulène – in signing an open letter published by the newspaper Libération, calling on the city of Paris to abandon the installation of Bouquet of Tulips by Jeff Koons.

Relational Aesthetics in particular has come to be seen as a defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s.

Bourriaud coined the term in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic that was shown at the CAPC contemporary art museum [13] in Bordeaux.