Taylor: Performance art, utilized by the likes of Carolee Schneeman and Marina Abramovic, placed the (gendered) body at the center, allowing for a means of expression or critique with no separation between art and artist.

Fraser: In her writings and her performances, Andrea Fraser asks her audience to consider the absurd contradictions of the art museum as an institution, a space that claims to serve the “public” but more often than not serves only the elite few.

Wilson and Corrin: Installation artist Fred Wilson critiques the museum’s overwhelming paucity of representations of people of color (specifically of people of Black or American Indian descent) and seeks to “de-neutralize” the public perception of the museum.

Andrea Fraser’s smart critiques of the institution that is the art museum thrilled me. I found the scripts from her performances amusing but, more than that, refreshing. Admittedly, I speak as an outsider from the “art world”, but Fraser’s playful but politically-charged work seems to me to fill a desperate void. In this “art world”, if I may indeed be so bold as to use such a homogenous image, I have the distinct impression that art and the artist take themselves too seriously. Fraser’s work admits and then critiques that nearly ubiquitous attitude, and the lack of brave, sharp-tongued individuals criticizing their own works or worlds. As an artist, she critiques the existing discourses surrounding art and, more specifically, the art museum… And the most wonderful part is that she does it quite literally within the museum itself! This, for me, is the proverbial cherry on top. She performs this critique from within the structure she is critiquing, speaking to the difficulty of a divorce between art/artist and the museum. She is able to deliver this critique, yes, but only within this sanctioned context. The “over-identification” observed in her work is endlessly fascinating, drawing on social tensions through the brilliant use of raciaized and class-based clichés and familiar “us” vs. “them” rhetoric. Fraser becomes Jane Castleton, the incarnation of the problematic nature of the art museum, the very thing she is fighting against.

Enjoyable and enlightening as these texts were for me, I was, like Fraser, disappointed to read about the “Sensation” controversy at the Brooklyn Museum and the relative silence of the museum. Art and the artist are not defended by what is arguably the most important part of the art world, the museum. Instead, questions of the exhibition of art/artist are chalked up to “consumerism”, and some bland desires to appropriate “pop culture” or “subculture” (which, as Fraser points out, raises even more questions on power dynamics within the museum). One must wonder if critiques of the institution itself, critiques like those from the likes of Fraser  or Fred Wilson, have been heard at all.

Perhaps it is my relative ignorance of art and the “art world” to which I keep referring, but it seems that while many artists rightly criticize the socio-political issues of their time, few seem to have critiqued one of the primary means by which they are able to critique, which is to say, the museum. I am left with the impression that the gaze of the artist rarely turns inward, so artists like Fraser, while they demonstrate incredible courage, are left quite alone in their bravery.