[1][2] Institutional critique takes the form of temporary or nontransferable approaches to painting and sculpture, architectural alterations and interventions, and performative gestures and language intended to disrupt the otherwise transparent operations of galleries and museums and the professionals who administer them.
Institutional critique is often site-specific and is contemporaneous with the advent of artists who eschewed gallery and museum contexts altogether to build monumental earthworks in the landscape, notably Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Walter de Maria, and Robert Smithson.
In the early 1990s, influenced in large part by Daniel Buren, Jacques Tati, Roland Barthes, and the participatory sculptures of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a loose affiliation of artists including Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, and Rirkrit Tiravanija engaged the institution of art in a convivial manner.
These artists, gathered under the rubric of Relational Aesthetics by critic Nicolas Bourriaud, saw galleries and museums as sites of social interaction and the spontaneous creation of works of art characterized by their contingent temporality.
[8][9] In recent years, Maurizio Cattelan, Ellen Harvey, Matthieu Laurette, monochrom, Tameka Norris, Tino Sehgal, Carey Young, and others have taken a critical eye to the art museum and its role as a public and private institution.