What do museums have in common with prisons? More than you might think, according to artist Andrea Fraser

2016-02-25T17:37:00-05:00

The average crow takes less than two hours to travel from Sing Sing maximum-security prison to the Whitney Museum of American Art, institutions separated by just 32 miles of land along New York’s Hudson river. Yet few humans journey between them – museums and prison are at opposite ends of our society’s self-imaginings, and their populations tend not to intersect.

"The artist Andrea Fraser – provocateur, professor and performer who famously posed the question of whether art is, metaphorically, prostitution by sleeping with a collector on camera in Untitled (2003) – will focus on the relationship between galleries and jails in a new site-specific project opening at the Whitney on Friday."

Fraser, also known for her institutional criticism of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Museum, told the Guardian: "They’re really two sides of the coin of social inequality...Museums increasingly are warehouses of wealth, capturing surplus in the form of artworks that are no longer financially productive. Prisons are institutions that warehouse surplus labour and populations that have been economically excluded from the labour market."

Interested in other provocative art endeavors? Check out some of these links:

Archinect - News

What do museums have in common with prisons? More than you might think, according to artist Andrea Fraser