Review: In Goya’s Shadow, Andrea Fraser’s Videos Skewer Social Institutions
Department of Art Professor Andrea Fraser
The New York Times calls Department of Art Professor Andrea Fraser's solo exhibition in Barcelona "funny, bold and extremely smart."
"BARCELONA — Spain might be the cradle of institutional critique, the brand of contemporary art that looks at how power and money shape art and how artists — often seen as independent operators — participate in this process.
The Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) made it clear in his paintings and prints that he was not amused by the monarchy or the Catholic Church, which controlled society in this corner of the world for centuries. And now, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) has mounted a 30-year retrospective of the American conceptual artist Andrea Fraser, whose work illustrates the cozy relationship between contemporary art, governments, corporations and wealthy individuals — and might be too incendiary for some American museums.
Ms. Fraser’s work has hardly been ignored by museums. This winter, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York mounted “Down the River”(2016), in which Ms. Fraser piped ambient audio recorded at Sing Sing prison into an empty gallery to give viewers a sense of inmates’ oppression and social isolation, and a retrospective of her work appeared at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, in 2013."— MARTHA SCHWENDENER, July 17, 2016
Read the full article at the New York Times website.