Andrea Fraser
Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989
SD video transferred to digital format, sound; 29 min. 28 sec.
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Copyright: Andrea Fraser
Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk
A seminal work of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser’s film Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) uses satire to deconstruct how cultural institutions demand reverence from the visitors they proclaim to serve and to interrogate the inherent power dynamics between museum and viewer.
The film follows Fraser acting as museum docent Jane Castleton, an persona invented by the artist to lead a tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Throughout the film, Fraser’s grandiose and laudatory proclamations are directed not only at the institution’s art collection and history but also liminal spaces like its bathrooms, exit signs, and the giftshop. Her exaggerated, overwrought gestures and condescending pose amplify the unspoken broader assumptions about the museum’s place within society: that while the art world proclaims it exists to uplift the everyman, its embedded architecture demands reverence from the viewer, who must instead prove their worthiness to its hallowed halls.
Fraser originally performed this tour live, on five different occasions, to PMOA visitors in February 1989. This film shows Fraser without an audience, performing instead for the camera.
This film will be on view in GRAM’s Hunting Gallery on the museum’s second level between February 1 — April 27, 2025.
