Interaction

Many works engaging institutional contexts for art and culture make us more aware of how we, as viewers and citizens, interact with art in a public setting. Some artists represented in Take It or Leave It have emphasized the role that the museum can play in socialization and education. Others have sought to make clear how artworks are necessarily enmeshed in addressing each audience member as an individual. Rather than seeking to make the interaction seamless, however, many artists instead create sites for exchange that can be surprisingly intimate or even uncomfortable. This is particularly significant in terms of addressing how an audience is implicated in the museum environment, arriving with certain expectations—of art's deep impact, on the one hand, or its assumed irrelevance, on the other—that may be productively belied. Here the smooth, conventional process of art living up to audience expectations or simply being blithely consumed is disrupted, so that criticality arises from an experience that might be simultaneously confusing, amusing, troubling, and profound.