Today, we expect culture to be socially relevant, reflect diversity, generate knowledge, protect the environment, engage with communities, be accessible, embrace technological innovation, and, of course, appeal to audiences. But what makes a work successful?

The problem arises when we mistake a collection of good intentions for a well-developed project or judge a work from a single perspective. A work can champion a just cause and still be poorly executed. It can also be formally accomplished yet have nothing to say, offering little more than fascination or entertainment. This tension is nothing new, but perhaps it is time to revisit it.

Imagine a documentary about the last remaining artisans keeping alive a craft passed down through generations. The story aims to pay tribute to memory, origins, and knowledge. Yet that alone does not make the project successful if the interviews are repetitive, the pace is needlessly slow, and the cinematography is visually unsophisticated for no apparent reason. The premise may be promising, but the project has yet to find the right form.

Mieke Bal has stressed that art and politics should be understood as intertwined, rather than as one and the same. This distinction matters: a work does not become contemporary simply by addressing a current issue. It needs to find a way to make that issue visible and memorable.

The aesthetic dimension is inseparable from the political issue: it makes the border more than a geopolitical concern, bringing its historical and emotional dimensions to life.

How, then, can we judge whether an artistic project succeeds on both a social or political level and an aesthetic one, while also speaking to its time?

First, we can ask what kinds of values a work engages with: moral, by raising a question of justice; epistemological, by helping us understand something in a different way; political, by challenging power relations or structures; symbolic, by transforming the collective imagination; and aesthetic, by using form to create a meaningful sensory experience. 

We also need to recognize that an overt political message may have limited impact, while an emphasis on visual spectacle can strip a work of substance, reducing it to entertainment. With this in mind, we can analyze a work on two levels and consider how they relate:

• The first examines the values the work seeks to convey from an ethical perspective, asking what matters to a community in terms of recognition, a vision of the common good, and everyday life. Here, we consider the individual as both a citizen and a consumer.
• The second takes an epistemic approach: it examines how the work uses its artistic language—medium, color palette, composition, rhythm, and so on. It then asks how effectively that language communicates the values identified at the first level within a particular context, by engaging our emotions, drawing us in, and giving us pleasure.

This calls for a broader understanding of the traditional relationship between form and content, without allowing either level to dominate or treating local tastes and values as universal. When this balance is achieved, the project gains coherence and becomes better able to create a meaningful experience.

It can also gain significance within the art world if it has the capacity to reflect on itself and prompt critical thinking that invites us to reconsider the channel, the medium, and the message.

As Arthur Danto observed in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), works of art are “ways of looking at the world,” helping us see it differently.

A contemporary work also exists within a cultural system that includes institutions, the market, audiences, and the ways works circulate. Assessing a project therefore also means asking what role it plays in the context in which it emerges.

An exhibition may promise participation while being organized entirely from the top down; a project may champion diversity while reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to challenge within its own organization; a museum may present a critical narrative while using it as a new way to legitimize itself as an institution. This dimension is part of a project’s meaning.

It is especially important now that cultural institutions have adopted much of the language of criticism. “Community,” “care,” “participation,” “sustainability,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” can easily become stock formulas for cultural programming. The result: what began as a challenge to the system may end up absorbed into it.

The same applies beyond art. A library, a festival, a publication, an archive, an educational program, or a digital platform can qualify as a contemporary project if it does more than offer content or entertainment: it must open up a space where we can see what we take for granted in a different light.

This is a fundamental challenge for culture. An aesthetic experience should leave us with a question: what draws us in should also make us think. This is precisely why Gerard Vilar has argued that art has cognitive value: it can help us think in new ways.

Culture should not have to choose between commitment and beauty, thought and emotion, knowledge and experience. Its real challenge is to bring them together.

Perhaps a successful work is one that opens a doorway in its own time, connecting social realities with artistic forms. Beyond that doorway, another world becomes possible.