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Participation, involvement, sociability are the keywords more and more often applied to contemporary art. Art practices today turn more into dialogue, artist and audience collaboration, rather than being expression of individualistic experience, and art critiques therefore are induced to search for new critical criteria. While in West Europe discussions on participatory art practices have started already in the end of 90's, Lithuanian critics are still behind in using and questioning these theoretical positions. This article aims to present most vivid theoretical and critical approaches to participatory practices of contemporary art, to discuss relations and differences between these standpoints as well as their lacks, and to bring forward new questions and problems. Neither contemporary participatory art practices nor the need to deal with them theoretically arose in the last decade of 20th century: it was rather coherent continuation of changes throughout the history of art and aesthetic thought. The article starts with presentation of most important premises of the phenomenon - that of poststructuralist approach towards art-work, the dematerialization of art, institutional theory of art and Institutional Critique, and critique of art space. Attempts toward changing the relation between art institution and everyday life prompted artists to focus on the viewer, the mediator between these two social spaces, and to rethink her/his relation to the work of art. One of the key notions in participatory art theory today is the one of relational aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud - which is true also because of vast critique towards it. Bourriaud takes contemporary art for the field of researching and producing human interactions and its social context: art projects focus on their effect on public or this 'effect' is the work of art itself. Nevertheless the critics like Claire Bishop and Hal Foster criticize the notion of relational aesthetics and relational art due to its overall unconcernedness: participation for the participation's sake, relations for the relations' sake seem to be enough, while the real problems concerning social relations are left behind. Grant Kester meanwhile is interested in sociallyengaged art projects, which define dialogue as their aesthetic core, and the artist is taken for facilitator of the dialogue among diverse communities, and context provider. But Kester as well as other critics comes to the dead-end while attempting to judge dialogical art projects. Bishop calls this dead-end ethical turn, since aesthetical criterions are replaced by ethical ones, based on equality and democracy towards non-artist communities participating in the art projects. The artist is as far conceived as social worker, therapeutist, or cultural animator. These problems in art critique force us to doubt the use of this new genre system. Perhaps renounced to manipulate the terms like relational, participatory, community-based, dialogical etc. we can focus not on the participation itself, but on significant whole of the work of art and the contribution of participation to it. There can be however no doubt, that participatory aspects of contemporary artworks change the whole institution of art: the concept of the gallery, the exhibition format, curatorial role, the way artists work, art politics, art critic's way etc. - and these are still waiting for investigations. One more waymark for researchers is the need to look at post-communist countries in regard of their way of understanding community strategies in contemporary art field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]