Towards the Usage Coefficient

In 2016, at the exhibition Making Use: Life in Postartistic Times at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, I first encountered the concept of the art coefficient. It gave form to an intuition I had never been able to articulate — one that surfaced each time I spoke about my own work. As early as 1957, Marcel Duchamp coined the term to describe the gap between an artist’s intention and the result of that artist’s work. In his lecture The Creative Act (Duchamp 1975: 138–140), he defined the art coefficient as “the arithmetical relation between what is unexpressed though intended and what is expressed unintentionally” (“Współczynnik sztuki” 2016). Put simply, he was interested in the difference between what the artist sought to convey and what the work ultimately communicates — often beyond the creator’s intent. For Duchamp, this discrepancy marks the beginning of artistic meaning. This unpredictable surplus can surprise artists, but it is also deeply inspiring. It shows that the creative process allows for chance, viewers’ interpretation, and new meanings. Duchamp suggested that, without this gap, art would be dead, exhausted at the moment of its making. Instead, the work lives on, evolving through its audiences’ interpretations. The art coefficient helps explain why, years later, we keep discovering something new in works we thought we knew. It is the result of intention meeting the work’s own life, a phenomenon Roland Barthes described in The Death of the Author (Barthes 1999: 247–251).

Decades have passed since then, and it might seem that Duchamp’s concept, somewhat forgotten, now survives mainly in books on art history. Yet Stephen Wright, a contemporary art theorist, brought the term back into circulation and gave it new meaning. In Toward a Lexicon of Usership (Wright 2016), he proposes that we see the art coefficient not as a one-time difference between intention and realisation, but as a variable degree of artistic intensity present in action itself. Inspired by Duchamp, he went a step further: he suggested that art is not a distinct class of objects, but rather a property — a kind of “substance” — that can manifest itself with varying intensity in all sorts of things and activities. According to Wright, the question “Is this art?” is replaced by “How much art is there in this?” Crucially, that “amount of art” is not fixed. The art coefficient is variable; it depends on context and on how a thing or action is used. Let us imagine, then, that there is no rigid division between works of art and ordinary objects or activities. Instead, every human activity and its material or immaterial result contains some degree of creative force — sometimes minimal, sometimes very high.

According to this line of thought, a painting in a museum may have a low art coefficient, despite its status. In contrast, an activist action outside the gallery may be saturated with art even if no one has officially designated it as such. This revaluation compels reflection. Wright asks provocatively: Is there more art inside museum galleries than outside? If calling something a “work of art” does not guarantee a high art coefficient — and lacking that status does not negate artistic value — then an exciting perspective opens up. Art ceases to belong to the few; it can appear wherever there is even a trace of creativity or meaning, sometimes in the least expected places. This idea proved important and liberating for me. It helped me understand that art is a phenomenon of variable intensity. In my own practice, I can work with this intensity consciously.

At this point, I arrive at my own artistic path — an attempt to enter into dialogue with the art coefficient, which I develop through the concept I call the Usage Coefficient. This arises from the need to answer a question: what kind of agency can art have, and on what do the effectiveness and durability of engaged art depend? Analysing participatory art projects, I concluded that the key lies not in the form of working with people, but in the actual use and maintenance of an action or object within living practice. What matters is what people do with an artistic undertaking, and for how long it can operate in the real world. Or, to return to Duchamp: how does it organise the relation between what is expressed as a possibility of use and what is intentionally used and sustained by a community of care?

The Usage Coefficient was born from observing how many excellent artistic initiatives come to an end with the closing of an exhibition or the exhaustion of grant funding. These projects leave behind ideas on paper or declarations in a catalogue, yet change very little in everyday life. On the other hand, a modest grassroots initiative — such as a community garden created with local residents — may continue and develop thanks to the involvement of successive participants. The difference lies in the “usage coefficient”: the extent to which a project is genuinely needed and used by its participants, and whether it is sustained over time. That is what leaves a lasting trace in reality.

To clarify these notions more fully, I introduce a brief definitional frame:

Schematically, the relation between these elements can be presented as follows:

Intention (proposal) → [process] → UC: use / maintenance / trace