{"product_id":"museum-highlights-the-writings-of-andrea-fraser-9780262562300","title":"Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser","description":"\u003cb\u003eEssays, criticism, and performance scripts written between 1985 and 2003 by an artist whose artistic practice investigates and reveals the social structures of art and its institutions.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eAndrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to \u003ci\u003eMuseum Highlights\u003c\/i\u003e, is able to \"trigger a social mechanism, a sort of \u003ci\u003emachine infernale\u003c\/i\u003e whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself.\" It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique--as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks--institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Fraser's writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003--including the performance script for the docent's tour that gives the book its title--both documents and represents her work. The writings in \u003ci\u003eMuseum Highlights\u003c\/i\u003e are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical \"artistic practice\" as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, \"Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao),\" reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book's 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAndrea Fraser is an artist and Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eMuseum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser\u003c\/i\u003e, published by the MIT Press.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50378776641810,"sku":"9780262562300","price":65.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_35e2d9f9-f09b-4dca-ba50-a767419cdba0.jpg?v=1728652138","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/museum-highlights-the-writings-of-andrea-fraser-9780262562300","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}