Introduction

In 1999, the Museum of Modern Art presented the exhibition The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, assembling the works of 60 artists who took the museum as their subject. From Roger Fenton's 1857 photograph of copyists in the British Museum's gallery of antiquities, to Claes Oldenburg's Mouse Museum (1965—77), to a video of Andrea Fraser's performance as mock-docent at the Wadsworth Atheneum (1991), the show displayed artists' engagements with an institution central to their education, career development, and canonization. Their attitudes toward it ranged from willing collaboration to wary cohabitation to outright subversion: as Kynaston McShine writes in the catalog introduction, the contents of museums inspire curiosity and wonder, "But artists of this century have shown a desire to explore the frame within which that sense of wonder is maintained" (17). Taking the museum as topic gave artists opportunities for critique—of the museum's collecting practices and patronage structures, for example—though the exhibit testified to the ease with which those critiques could be absorbed, arranged in "a general narrative sequence" (25) on MoMA's walls. Yet even in a neutralizing survey, these glimpses of the museum in the museum allowed for startling recognition of the conventions shaping experiences of art, conventions we normally overlook. Thomas Struth's 1994 photograph of MoMA visitors catches them in blurred motion in front of Jackson Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950 —leaning in with a squint, turning away in bewilderment, clutching an explanatory brochure, taking a snapshot as souvenir. Struth explains that he strives to set up a disquieting encounter for the museumgoer who contemplates his photograph of museumgoers: "Therein lies a moment of pause or of questioning" (qtd. in McShine 17).