There’s No Place Like Home

<p>Andrea Fraser’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2012 is an essay, “There’s No Place Like Home,” available to read in the exhibition catalogue and presented here as a downloadable PDF. The form of Fraser’s contribution reflects her longstanding engagement with art discourse, which for Fraser encompasses all that participants in the art world write and say about art and their own art-related activities. Fraser’s previous work has taken the form of museum tours and audio guides, art lectures and panel discussions, exhibition brochures, critical essays, and, indeed, even wall texts such as this (in fact, the artist wrote this text herself). Following the principle of critical reflexivity that has guided her work since the mid-1980s, Fraser’s essay here not only takes the form of art discourse but also focuses on the role of art discourse in the art world today. The artist elaborates on the contradiction between what art is socially and economically—often, essentially, high-valued luxury goods and investment vehicles—and what artists, critics, curators, and historians say that art does and means. She suggests that this contradiction reflects fundamental conflicts that have intensified along with income inequality and that art discourse, rather than reveal these conflicts, often serves instead to distance, disown, and conceal them. As such, Fraser writes, participants in the art world who perform these operations in art discourse “not only banish entire regions of our own activities and experiences, investments, and motivations to insignificance, irrelevance, and unspeakability, we also consistently misrepresent what art is and what we do when we engage with art and participate in the art field.”</p>