Painting is not made to decorate apartments.
It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.
— Pablo Picasso
It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.
— Pablo Picasso
This strikingly militant idea of art as a tool of struggle rather than a passive ornament may not sound especially novel today, yet in an age of climate crisis, it seems more relevant than ever. We are living, after all, in an age of entanglement — an ever more visible interpenetration of different spheres, of nature and culture, in which art, social life, climate change, politics, and non-human beings, along with many other actors not named here, are becoming ever more tightly bound together. The boundaries between the artistic and the useful, between the human and the non-human, are increasingly blurred. In such an entangled reality, there arises a need for a new way of thinking about the effectiveness of art and, where existing answers prove insufficient, for introducing a new tool. The Usage Coefficient grows precisely out of this entanglement, and out of the conviction that those working in art today should seek greater agency and greater durability in what they do.
For more than a century, artists have consistently challenged the old divisions between art and “non-art.” Marcel Duchamp, by turning a urinal into a fountain, questioned the sanctity of the museum object and suggested that anything might be art. In 1957, he introduced the notion of the “art coefficient,” thereby drawing attention to the fact that creative intentions do not always coincide with the anticipated result — that art has a life of its own and escapes the artist’s full control. This reflection, expanded a few decades later through Stephen Wright’s interpretations, opened the way to thinking of reality as a surrounding field of things and fluid situations, each of which may possess a high or low art coefficient.
Before Wright, however, several artists and theorists gradually shifted the boundaries of art in his direction. One of them was Joseph Beuys, who was among the first to blur so clearly the divisions between art, society, and nature. His concept of “social sculpture,” together with his famous proposition that “everyone is an artist,” called for the activation of creative potential in every aspect of collective life. When Beuys planted 7,000 oaks in Kassel during documenta 7, he was operating simultaneously in symbolic and practical spaces. He was creating a work of art while simultaneously greening the urban environment. The artist became a gardener and activist, and art became a tool for directly transforming its surroundings. Such gestures anticipated a world in which art and usefulness would become inseparably intertwined.
In Poland, these transformations were acutely sensed by Jerzy Ludwiński. As early as the 1970s, he announced the arrival of the “post-artistic era.” He observed that art had undergone such profound metamorphoses that it had lost its traditional boundaries. Art became like a snowball that, as it rolls, absorbs more areas of reality until it finally becomes the globe itself (“Epoka postartystyczna” 2016). In Ludwiński’s vision, art gradually identifies itself with reality and happens everywhere. It can no longer be easily distinguished from other activities. “Art = reality,” he wrote prophetically, anticipating a time when a high art coefficient would permeate many spheres of life. Ludwiński foresaw the kind of art Wright would later describe as operating at a 1:1 scale. This art takes place directly in reality rather than in modelled representations.
Stephen Wright, cited above, argues that the future of art lies in usage-oriented artistic practices at a 1:1 scale. These are not reduced models of potential actions, but actions occurring in the here and now (Wright 2016, 16–19). Such art activates its ordinary use-value while also deactivating its aesthetic function. It works directly in daily life: painting houses, cultivating a shared garden, or running an alternative educational institution. At first glance, it no longer appears to be “art.” Its effects are practical and real; still, the artistic aura within them becomes harder to perceive. That is the paradox: the more useful and life-embedded the practice, the less obvious it is art at all.
At the same time, profound changes are taking place in the way we think about the world. As early as the 1980s, Donna Haraway, in her famous Cyborg Manifesto, showed that we are entangled in a network of relations with machines and other species, and that the boundary between the human and the non-human is no longer self-evident. Once we realise that we are part of a larger whole — an ecosystem of people, animals, and things — we begin to see culture and art differently as well. Artists increasingly include non-human agents in their projects, collaborating with animals, plants, and technologies to produce works that exceed anthropocentric frameworks. Could it be otherwise, when the climate crisis forces us to abandon the idea of the Vitruvian Man as the centre of all things? Posthumanism thus adds another dimension to this entanglement: an ethical question about coexistence with other beings and about responsibility for the planet. It seems to me that art is accepting this challenge with growing boldness — artistic projects are emerging that care for the Earth’s non-human inhabitants and the natural environment with the same seriousness with which they care for people. When Cecylia Malik and the Mothers on the Logging Site protest against the destruction of the country’s last wild habitats, or when Forensic Architecture provides evidence of Israeli ecocide in the Gaza Strip, the boundary between activism, politics, and art dissolves completely. Such examples show that art today can take the form of resistance, standing shoulder to shoulder with nature and working toward shared solutions among humans and non-humans alike.
At the same time, awareness is growing that the existing capitalist model, based on unlimited growth, is unsustainable. The post-growth idea encourages us to seek alternatives to endless increases in production and consumption. It favours restraint, balance, and usefulness over novelty and scale. In the art world, this amounts to a call to rethink the systemic criteria by which institutions operate. Instead of valuing a work for its uniqueness, price, or attendance, what matters is what the work does: whom it supports, what it repairs, and what change it initiates. Post-growth thinking is closely tied to engaged art, as both focus on responsibility and the practical side of our actions. Artists with these ideas often choose strategies for long-term benefit over immediate effect. They may create public knowledge archives, organise community gardens instead of monumental installations, or even embrace deliberate non-action. Thus, they resist wastefulness and perpetual growth and propose caring for shared resources rather than racing to take on more projects and productions.
All these threads — the social usefulness of art, the posthumanist expansion of creative subjectivity, and the post-growth reorientation of values — intertwine to form the backdrop to the Usage Coefficient. This entanglement brings both new opportunities and tensions. Art has never been so close to life — it can educate, heal trauma, integrate communities, build insect shelters, or purify water. Yet, as art becomes more of a tool, the question arises: is this still art, or merely activism, ecology, or social work? Claire Bishop notes that in socially engaged projects, aesthetics is often subordinated to ethics and effectiveness. This prompts the question: should such actions be evaluated by artistic criteria or social impact (Bishop 2015)? Florian Malzacher asks whether any “beautiful” exhibition can affect reality as much as socially engaged artistic interventions. He cites Bogotá’s mayor, Antanas Mockus, who used artistic strategies to make the city safer: exchanging weapons for toys, establishing libraries where ID was not required, and replacing traffic police with mimes, believing that laughter would be more effective than fines. These actions show that art embedded in daily life can have an immense impact, even if its “artisticity” becomes debatable (Malzacher 2018).
We are thus faced with the question of how to grasp this new role of art and how to evaluate it. This is where the proposed Usage Coefficient comes into play. It is conceived as a practical tool for navigating the entangled web of relations between art and the world. Put simply, the Usage Coefficient is a self-diagnostic measure of artistic usefulness — an indicator of the extent to which a given undertaking translates into real social or ecological benefit. It can be understood as an extension of Duchamp’s “art coefficient” for our own time. Whereas Duchamp was interested in the discrepancy between intention and effect, the Usage Coefficient focuses on the convergence between the artist’s action and its impact in the world. In other words, it asks: how useful is what the artist does to someone? This may sound like heresy against the belief in art’s autonomy. Yet today, such a question resounds ever more strongly.
Tania Bruguera, the initiator of Arte Útil — useful art — proposes that artistic practice should be assessed, among other things, according to whether it brings concrete benefits to its users, challenges the existing system, and transforms recipients into active co-creators — into users, precisely (Bruguera 2025). The Usage Coefficient belongs to this current of thought. It helps determine how to prepare and which tools to use to make our actions more effective. It values projects not for their attractive form, but for their practical contribution and their capacity for change, precisely where traditional criticism saw only “non-artistic” activity. This is not about reducing art to numbers — quite the opposite. UC is meant to supplement our perspective with a dimension that has until now been difficult to grasp. The question “Is this good art?” is thus complemented by the question “What good comes of this art?” Of course, such a measure may give rise to debate — and that is a good thing, because it testifies to the vitality of the project. To my mind, what is unique about this approach is that the idea of the Usage Coefficient grows organically out of the entanglement described above. It is a response to a real need of the era, in which art wants — and must — to take shared responsibility for the world beyond the museum frame.
In closing, it is worth noting a certain paradox: in speaking of entanglement — an idea in which everything is connected — we are at the same time trying to untangle and order it. Perhaps, however, that is exactly what must be done. The world is entangled, and simple answers are becoming ever rarer. For that very reason, there is a growing need to adapt our tools to contemporary challenges. The Usage Coefficient provides a framework but does not limit solutions. It allows artists to preserve their creativity while also giving them tools to think about real change. In this way, art, activism, climate crisis, and politics are no longer separate threads, but are woven together in an ordered way into a strong rope — one with which we may yet try to shake the imagination of a numbed world.