ABSTRACT
The history of tensions between artists and the institutional spaces in which art is displayed is long and colorful. Notable instances include protests and counterexhibitions mounted in response to the salon in nineteenth-century France and the rhetorical extremes of the Futurists, linking museum to mausoleum and calling for its immolation. Over the past fifty years, however, there has been an exponential rise in the complexity of this dance of attraction and confrontation, as the canonization of historic avant-garde movements has been followed by the absorption of strategies associated with institutional critique. Museums play a crucial role in the decentralized process of conferring value on modern and contemporary art, even as programming is linked not only to gallery offerings but also, in less obvious ways, to projects undertaken as part of a conscious effort to work outside museum traditions. As critical consensus regarding the significance of anti-aesthetic as well as anti-institutional gestures has helped precipitate their incorporation into canonical museum narratives, it is important to pay attention to what is lost through this approbation.
