Touring The Broad’s interior without any visual art was an affecting, if not somewhat frustrating, experience. Perhaps overly accustomed to the white box, my positive museum experiences tend to occur in spaces that defer to the art’s atmosphere – or are completely overtaken by them. One particular version of this took place during a 2010 visit to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, where in the museum’s main hall, I wandered into Roman Ondák’s "It Will All Turnout Right in the End". The installation appears on the outside as a kind of mobile trailer unit, but once inside, unveils itself as a scaled-down replica of the interior of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The Tate’s interior is objectified as an art object, and the museum visitor slips through a wormhole of art-space-time into becoming an art object within a reconstituted art space. This prompts the disembodying experience of feeling simultaneously as the viewer and the viewed, locked in a quantum entanglement analogized by a selfie stick.

This kind of self-aware social-affectedness was on full display at The Broad. People were not entirely sure how to act: What social cues do I follow when I’m in a museum with no visual art? Is the building I’m touring now a piece of art that I’m meant to appreciate and study? How do I do that? Can my kids run around? This recalled the Gulliver-esque experience of being inside the Bahnhof’s Tate, which turns the viewer’s (visitor’s? inhabitant’s?) gaze back onto their own movements, now that they’ve found themselves insides the receiving hall of a power station-turned-museum-turned-art piece. And while technically there was art on display during The Broad’s preview day (BJ Nilsen’s DTLA sound installation was played throughout, and after dark, Yann Novak’s sound and light work, Stillness, came on display), it was very easy to entirely dismiss in the murmuring midst of wandering selfie-takers and roving toddlers. The human social experience had fully become the subject of the “exhibition”.

This is exactly the kind of dynamic that arises from the contemporary art explainer-theory of relational aesthetics – that art derives not from an authored product, but from the relative social and human interactions that an artist provokes. This is not a self-descriptive theory, but a put-upon by the theorist Nicolas Bourriaud who coined the term in the late 1990s – his exhibition “Traffic” was a showcase of artists who he believed confirmed his theory of "relational aesthetics". It’s Bourriaud’s post-rationalized explanation for other artists work, an explanation that the artists themselves might not actually agree with. It could be argued that relational aesthetics is equally responsible for both the praise and hate shoveled on recent spectacle-based exhibitions like Carston Höller's slide (Tate Modern 2006-2007), Random International's "Rain Room" (MoMA 2013-2014), Pierre Huyghe’s Ibizan hound and beehive (LACMA, 2014-2015), or even BIG's maze (National Building Museum, 2014). The theory itself is also nowadays derided within art criticism, for its shrugging-emoji approach to art as anything any artist stages in a museum.

But maybe Bourriaud’s theory wasn’t ever intended to last – perhaps it was devised to move past the fallout from 1960s radicalism in performance art, and play upon new conventions of connectivity and the visualized networks of the rapidly changing 1990s’ World Wide Web. Maybe it’s best treated as a transitional growing pain. It arose far before the industrial social media machine added followers to friends, but seems (to me at least) to have become a helpful lens for considering 21st-century art. It’s not as simple as “Instagram changed how we look at stuff”, nor is it a shortcut for saying art is now more democratic, or that art should be an “experience” – rather, it’s a step away from the individual author as a key concept of artistic production, and towards the murkier machine of social agency. The aesthetic objects of architecture are the lived platforms for that agency, and Sky-lit briefly shone light on that fact.