ABSTRACT
Historically, visitors to museums were thought to passively receive meaning emanating from a painting or sculpture, thus locating the value of the work in the material object itself rather than its impact on viewers. Frustrated by the reduction of their work to a commodity, artists working in the mid-twentieth century began shifting the definition of art away from marketable objects toward ineffable subjective experiences. Artists who make interiors heighten the perception of their audiences by breaking their habituated ways of using spaces, often riffing on the everyday environments that interior designers produce. These artists identify their trope as "installation art." Marcel Duchamp's position gives artists a way around the idea that living in their work is a failure if the result is different from the point of departure intention. Artists build on some works by constructing and occupying extreme interiors and using them as giant microscopes through which they can more clearly see how these environments influence their subjectivities.
