Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk

Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk is a performance in the form of a guided tour for visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which took place in February 1989. Dressed in a formal grey skirt-suit, Fraser assumes the identity of Jane Castleton, a volunteer guide taking visitors on a route through the galleries, lobby and cafeteria. In addition to the usual comments of a tour guide on the history of the institution and its collection, Castleton shares personal thoughts about the building, the cloakroom and the toilets of the museum, as well as her passionate opinions on politics and social classes.

For Fraser, Castelton embodies the role of a figure habitually found in the North American museum context: the upper-class amateur volunteer who has ‘the leisure and economic and cultural capital that defines a museum’s patron class’. Through the figure of Castelton and the language she uses, Fraser exposes the social history of the art museum in the United States, emphasising the relationships between taste and class, private philanthropy and public policy in museum production as well as other spheres of urban culture.