Taylor: Taylor’s historical chronicle of performance art illustrates the genre as one that mimics life’s (un)scripted, (un)predictable, and ephemeral nature.

Fraser: Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights is a sobering treatise that begs us to strategically deconstruct an art institution that has historically been the recipient of our unquestioning admiration and allegiance.

Andrea Fraser’s scripted performances in Museum Highlights legitimizes many of my own experiences of feeling inferior during my visits to art institutions throughout my childhood and young adult life.  Her impersonation of distinguished representatives of the museum quickly brought to light the specific mannerisms that were at the source of my discomfort. It was the way the curators, docents, guards and guides were dressed in either an official uniform or a particular high-class style of dress… It was also the way they moved about the art space, their knowledge of the “right” order in which to view the art works, the “best” viewing distance in which to interact with the piece, and their control over the amount of time an individual is given to take in a masterpiece. And it was the discriminatory and almost cryptic dialect which they employed in an effort to distinguish the prestigious and tasteful works of art exhibited in the museum from the lower-class creations existing outside of the museum walls…

In Frazer’s concluding quote of Chapter 9, she sums up the function of the museum not only as a site of socialization for the lower-class public, but as a discriminatory body that produces value and meaning in the art world: “distinguishing between a coat room and a rest room, between a painting and a telephone, a guard and a guide…”

In Chapter 11, Frazer continues to demystify the naturalized rhetoric about the characteristics of a museum as ordained. When considering the names of museums, lobbies or wings of an art institution, Frazer brings attention to the fact that many were named after historically wealthy-class individuals.  What’s more, she makes note of the fact that many buildings were given names “in memory of loved ones who sometimes had no interest in art themselves,” which served to discredit my assumption that all the patrons of that time had a taste for art. Learning the details behind a museum’s formation helped me as a consumer of art to humanize an art institution that is commonly seen as impenetrable. It also disrupts the belief that museums are naturally exclusive entities. Frazer makes it easier for art critics and the general public alike to see the institution’s systematic maintenance of disproportionate power relations between museum “insiders” and “outsiders.”