After reading the transcript of Andrea Fraser’s performance Welcome to the Wadsworth at the Wadsworth Atheneum and her letter to the museum’s curator, I searched the Internet to find a recording of her performance.  The first video I found was was a brief and poorly-shot tape of someone watching a recording of Fraser’s performance on a television.  The people watching the performance, whom one can hear chatting and laughing behind the camera, seem to be watching the performance with no context or prior knowledge of it’s aims. They didn’t know it was a satire and carefully staged critique.  My immediate reaction was to dismiss these viewers as missing the point of Fraser’s work but I realized that their exposure to the performance was very close to that of the original audience and so their reaction shouldn’t be shrugged off . They hadn’t been prepped with Fraser’s writings and commentary on the work before seeing it as I had which brought me back to a question that had been floating around in my head while reading the performance script.  Does the performance lose power if the audience never catches on that it’s a critique?  Is this kind of commentary intended only for insiders?  If it falls on deaf ears in the original audience does that make the recordings and transcripts even more important?