I want to focus at some length on Marcia Tucker's essay partly because of the role she has played in the museum's consecrating practices, but also because her writing is paradigmatic of the apolitical postmodern feminism favoured by contemporary museum personnel, who, knowingly or not, continue to mask the museum's underpinnings in a value system based entirely on private collection, evaluation, display, and circulation of commodities - in other words, in modernism. It is not enough to flaunt the museum's political liberatory aspirations while actively disseminating hegemonic culture based entirely on private exchange. Avant-gardist transgressions have been good for business. Dadaists of all sorts have been testing the resilience and elasticity of the art world's institutional walls, which they have been found to be limitless. Goode Bryant then answers these questions with historically specific and critically grounded examples.
Appropriation provides the appearance of something without the action or event.
Bad Girls is all image and style, floating free from its institutional moorings - New York transgressive art at its best. But, we all know that appearances can be very deceiving. The book provides a snapshot of museums' paradoxical sites - that is, it shows that museums are part and parcel, as are other modernist institutions, of the apparatus whose real purpose of existence is to fuel our unconscious desires, which in turn keep the commodity culture going, despite the innocence claimed by museums' gatekeepers. But for me, this apparent failure becomes the book's value, in that it bares the contradictions of contemporary art practices. Ingeniously laid-out pages, provocative photographs, and witty condemnations of traditional art and its patrons do not erase the fact that all differences, multivocalities, and temporal and geographical spatialities are neatly framed within the politically neutralizing synchronicity of the museum spectacle, even if the museum is none other than the New Museum of Contemporary Art.