If you’ve been around art in the last several decades or so, you likely have heard the term “institutional critique.” This is a genre of art that turns the lens back  onto the world around the art object as its subject, finding playful or polemical ways to provoke thought on art’s unspoken rules and expectations and links to the wider world.

Andrea Fraser is one of the artists who has most helped define “institutional critique” as a genre and as a practice. She has done this in artworks that sometimes look like performances, or lectures, or works of research—but also in her essays and theoretical writings.

One of her recent essays, “The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram,” published over at e-Flux Notes, is an attempt literally to map out how contemporary art is not one thing but a landscape of different competing camps and value systems, so that you might figure out where you stand within it. She calls this theory “a resource to make sense of a field that makes no sense,” and she agreed to talk to art critic Ben Davis about it.

 

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