Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the complicated relationship between artists, their publics and museum learning, the investment that museums have made in contemporary art and artists, and the investment that they have made in museums. It situates the growth of artist's interventions in close relation to developments taking place in museum culture, particularly the shift in the way that visitors experience and learn from collections. The book examines far-reaching pedagogic implications for museum professionals and intervening artists, alongside visitors. It provides a more detailed account of the parodic and ironic methodologies and trickster tactics and addresses artist's interventions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book also identifies a substantive lineage of critical, disruptive, visual, immersive and parodic methods employed in interventionist artworks within a continuum of avant-garde practice.