Should artists be able to freely create without worrying about how their work will be received? Three prominent American artists met recently at the Center for British Art at Yale University to tackle this question. The artists, Sam Durant, Hans Haacke, and Andrea Fraser, participated in the panel, “Artistic Practice as Institutional Critique” which was moderated by Jennifer Gross. They discussed the difficulties contemporary artists can experience trying to balance creating their art and living up to the expectations of the modern art historian and American museums. In an article for the Yale Daily News, Makda Asrat looked at how each artist handled this issue in their work. Of Andrea Fraser, author of Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (edited by Alexander Alberro), which investigates and reveals the social structures of art and its institutions, Asrat said:
A performance and video installation artist, Fraser departed from the norm and declined to be introduced by Gross. Instead, she approached the podium and announced herself that "the next presenter will be Andrea Fraser." Fraser cycled through a series of personas, commenting on the work of her fellow panelists and calling attention to the hypocritical (and sometimes paradoxical) behavior of many contemporary artists.
After her entertaining introduction, which evoked suppressed sniggers from many audience members, Fraser assumed her "real" persona and explained that her work is meant to examine the relationships between artists, collectors and museums.
"My work exists at the intersection of research-based analysis and the performance-based investigation of interpersonal relationships and the subjective interests that people bring to art," she said.
All three artists -- Durant, Haack and Fraser -- expressed the desire to call into question the symbolic value that art, artists and society at large have attached to the institution of the museum as representative of the apogee of human achievement.
"Values such as fame and celebrity are seeping into the art world and pushing out other values that used to define the art world, such as dissension and questioning," Fraser said. "It makes art and what we aspire to be and achieve as artists inherently political."
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