It can refer to "relationship" or to "Relational Aesthetics". Relational Art or "Relational Aesthetics" is a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defined the approach simply as, "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." In music, electroclash phenomenon, and some later attitudes/movements can be considered as relational.

Writer and director Ben Lewis has suggested that relational art is the new "ism", in analogue with "ism"s of earlier periods such as impressionism, expressionism and cubism. Lewis finds many similarities between relational art and earlier "ism"s at their beginnings: relational art is often not considered art at all because it redefines the concept of art, many artists considered "relational" deny that they are such and relational art had a "founding" exhibition.

In "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics", published in 2004 in October, Claire Bishop describes the aesthetic of Palais de Tokyo as a "laboratory", the "curatorial modus operandi" of art produced in the 1990s. Bishop identifies Bourriaud's book as an important first step in identifying tendencies in contemporary art. However, Bishop, also asks "if relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?" She continues that "the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness."
The University of New Mexico's College of Fine Arts links its fine arts program with the ideas of relational art.