Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells examines the rise of participatory art from the historic avant-garde to contemporary socially engaged practice, arguing that collaboration cannot be judged solely by ethical goodwill or social utility. For Bishop, participatory art replaces the discrete art object with situations, workshops, performances, communities, and long-term projects in which people become the medium of the work. Yet she warns that this “social turn” often produces a critical blind spot: projects are praised because they appear inclusive, therapeutic, or community-oriented, while questions of aesthetic complexity, conflict, authorship, spectatorship, and political ambiguity are neglected. Her case studies range from Futurism, Dada, Situationism, Latin American actions, Soviet and Eastern European practices, British community arts, and post-1989 European projects to delegated performance and pedagogic art. Bishop’s central intervention is her critique of the ethical turn, especially the tendency to equate good collaboration with good art. The image on page 4, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Spectre of Evaluation, encapsulates the book’s anxiety over how institutions, critics, artists, and “the other” evaluate socially engaged art. Bishop concludes that participatory art matters most when it does not merely repair social bonds, but creates difficult, troubling, and memorable forms that rethink the politics of spectatorship.