Institutional Critique

In art, Institutional Critique is the systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, such as galleries and museums, and is most associated with the work of artists like Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, John Knight (artist), Fred Wilson, and Hans Haacke.

Institutional Critique is a form of commentary on the various institutions and conventions of art, as well as a radical disarticulation of the institution of art. For instance, assumptions about the supposed aesthetic autonomy or neutrality of painting and sculpture are often explored as a subject in the field of art, and are then historically and socially mapped out (e.g. ethnographically, archaeologically) as discursive formations, then (re)framed within the context of the museum itself. As such, Institutional Critique seeks to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Institutional Critique is often critical of the false separations often made between distinctions of taste and supposedly disinterested aesthetic judgement, and affirms that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility that may tend to differ according to the class, ethnic, sexual and gender backgrounds of art's audiences.

Institutional Critique is a practice that emerged from the developments of Minimalism and its concerns with the phenomenology of the viewer, as well as formalist art criticism and art history (e.g. Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried), conceptual art and its concerns with language, processes, and administrative society, and appropriation art and its concerns with consumption and identity. Institutional critique is often site-specific, and perhaps could be linked to the advent of the "earthwork" by minimalist artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria. Institutional critique is also often associated with the developments of structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy, critical theory and literary theory.

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