Rancière

"An art is emancipated and emancipating when it renounces the authority of the imposed message, the target audience, and the univocal mode of explicating the world, when, in other words, it stops wanting to emancipate us"

"No surface provides emancipation in and of itself, the problem is to define a way of looking that doesn't preempt the gaze of the spectator... Emancipation is the possibility of a spectator's gaze other than the one that was programmed. This goes for the critical artist as well as for the window dresser."

-- From an interview published in Artforum. Read the whole thing online here.