ABSTRACT
The intervention An Elite Experience for Everyone is a performance in which attention is paid to the slippage between language forms in the gallery or museum environment. It takes the form of a parodic, guided tour conducted by ‘Victoria Fielding’, a character who appropriates a composite text, garnered from the words and manners of others, specifically sampled from legitimated discourses. The intervention enables a recognition of the way that difference is achieved through the insistence on pre-requisites: for example certain forms of knowledge, reception, behaviour and values. The chapter provides a ‘trickster’ perspective testing gallery practices and values that are held in place and made ‘normal’ by social relations. It explores parody, legitimised transgression and fictitious narrative at first hand and reveals the authority that the museum carries with it and its effects of belief.
