Institutional Critique

About

Institutional critique turns art on the places and systems that frame it: museums, collections, exhibitions, funding and the unspoken rules of display. It took shape in the late 1960s, when Conceptual artists recognised that display shapes meaning. In 1968 Marcel Broodthaers opened a fictional museum in his Brussels home, the Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, and ran it until 1972 with crates, postcards and labels. Hans Haacke's MoMA Poll (1970) asked visitors whether the governor of New York's silence on the war in Indochina would stop them voting for him; the governor, Nelson Rockefeller, sat on the museum's board.

Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum (1992) rearranged the holdings of a Baltimore historical society, placing iron slave shackles in a case of fine silver. Andrea Fraser toured the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 as an overeager guide, praising a drinking fountain in the language of connoisseurship.