Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cThis is a beautiful piece,\u201d says\u00a0Andrea Fraser, an artist with conflicted feelings about luxury goods and art markets. \u201cA\u00a0sophisticated composition of austere dignity,\u201d she continues slyly. We\u2019re on our third of three Zoom calls. Fraser is\u00a0in New York for her Phoebe Philo photoshoot, and I\u2019m at home in San Francisco. The artist is reciting lines from her 1991 satirical performance May I\u00a0Help You?, where she plays the role of an art dealer. \u201cIt\u2019s\u00a0distinctive, disinterested, gratuitous, refined, restrained, sober, calm,\u201d she continues. \u201cIt has such tact, such grace, such quiet self-assurance. It\u2019s so far away from the passions that ordinary people invest in their ordinary lives.\u201d We laugh, because we know that the elite\u00a0phrases once used to sell high art can now be applied\u00a0to minimalist fashion.After Philo\u2019s people contacted Fraser about this feature, the artist delved into the brand\u2019s website and had\u00a0\u201can intense emotional response\u201d to the designer\u2019s work. \u201cThe models seem to be hiding in the clothes, but also asserting themselves,\u201d she says. Muscular from years of weightlifting and samba dancing, the brunette, who is 5ft 6in and 135lb, wears a\u00a0black T-shirt and nerdy black-rimmed specs. \u201cCollection B addresses the problem of fitting. This is how I feel all the time. I am always trying to\u00a0figure out how to fit in.\u201d It\u00a0was Fraser\u2019s idea to wear the\u00a0clothes and\u00a0mimic the poses of Philo\u2019s lookbook. She\u00a0explained that it was hard\u00a0to perfect and hold postures that the models had swiftly moved through. Also evident is Fraser\u2019s inability to deflect attention to the\u00a0garments by lightening up her intense presence.Born to a mother whose paintings were never publicly displayed, Fraser inherited her ambition to be a celebrated artist. She also absorbed her painful legacy of being ignored. In the 1960s, her mother\u2019s gender, feminism and Puerto Rican ethnicity, and later her lesbianism, posed insurmountable obstacles to artistic success, leading her to abandon painting and become a psychotherapist.By contrast, Fraser\u2019s career has been punctuated by praise and acclaim. She has performed in person or in video in many major museums, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and MoMA New York. Pioneering a\u00a0genre called \u201cinstitutional critique\u201d, Fraser\u2019s work initially addressed class, race and gender in the art world, but in recent decades it has expanded to explore these \u201cinstitutions\u201d in other social worlds as well. Well-known in Germany, in 2013 she enjoyed a solo retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. She has just opened another, titled Art Must Hang, at the Zach\u0119ta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, which runs until 8 June. Fraser grew up in Berkeley, California, surrounded by queer hippies from whom she absorbed the camp adage \u201cThere\u2019s no shame in being poor, only poorly dressed\u201d. The\u00a0fifth of five children, Fraser never had new clothes. \u201cI\u00a0wore\u00a0hand-me-downs and reconstructed garments, like old jeans that were \u2018hippified\u2019 by inserting a triangle of cloth \u2013 usually a Madras bedspread \u2013 to create flares,\u201d she explains. The sartorial pride of the family was Fraser\u2019s eldest brother, who rode a unicycle wearing a suede fringe jacket and a satin top hat. (The artist\u2019s affection for flower-child masculinity is explored in Men on the Line, a performance in which she recreates a 1972 round table discussion between four men who identify as feminists.)Hierarchies are a key issue for Fraser. She is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and chaired its prestigious art department for nearly four\u00a0years. Remarkably, for someone in this position, she\u00a0does not have a single university degree. She dropped out of Berkeley High shortly before turning 16, moved to\u00a0New York, talked her way into art school and then moved on to\u00a0the Whitney Independent Study Program rather than graduating. The experience fuelled her desire to fit in and her awareness of clothes as social markers and metaphors. \u201cWhen I was a teen circulating in the New York art world, I needed to pass as an adult. I also wanted to pass as someone who had a college degree and\u00a0an income,\u201d she explains. \u201cPeople call it code-switching, but that implies a kind of mastery and play. For\u00a0me, it was much more desperate.\u201d Although precise costuming is essential to a Fraser performance, the artist is notorious for appearing in the buff. One of her greatest hits, repeatedly requested by museums and private collectors, falls into \u201cthe grand old tradition of nudie performance art\u201d, as she puts it. Written and first performed in 2001, Official Welcome is a kind of\u00a0surreal one-woman awards ceremony in which Fraser plays the parts of nine artists who are being introduced and celebrated by nine gushing museum insiders. Midway\u00a0through the performance, Fraser strips down to a black Gucci thong, bra and high heels, and says, \u201cI\u2019m not\u00a0a person today. I\u2019m an object in an artwork.\u201d Later, she paraphrases vintage Damien Hirst (from the days before he quit drinking, and had a penchant for pulling moonies), declaring, \u201cHow about \u2018Kiss my fucking ass!\u2019\u201d before bending over to brandish her buttocks. A few characters later, Fraser slips off her remaining garments. While\u00a0standing there stark naked, her character says earnestly, \u201cSome people think she\u2019s sacrificed her body\u00a0for professional success.\u201dSelf-reflexivity is woven into Fraser\u2019s every move. Nudity is such a clich\u00e9 of transgression that the artist jokes, \u201cI\u2019m not really naked because I\u2019m in\u00a0quotation marks.\u201d When preparing to re\u2011perform Official Welcome, Fraser acknowledges that the most difficult decision pertains to\u00a0the coiffure of her\u00a0pubic hair: \u201cUntrimmed, landing strip or full Brazilian \u2013 my choices have been inconsistent over the years.\u201dFraser also ends up naked in her infamous Untitled (2003), which documents her sexual encounter in a hotel room with an art collector who pre-purchased the video documentation of their carnal exchange. By having the collector pay for the video rather than the sex, Fraser was able to represent artists in general as escorts of the rich while positioning herself as an amateur pornographer. Even though the idea behind Untitled is sensational, the video is comically unspectacular. It consists of one silent, static shot taken from a high angle, suggestive of surveillance cameras, and the participants come across as awkward strangers on a one-night stand. The video is\u00a0so intentionally artless that, when it was first exhibited, the gallery\u2019s visitors\u2019 book was full of confused complaints\u00a0about its lack of eroticism.A prolific writer, Fraser also often pens her own press releases to assuage her anxiety about being misunderstood and extend her self-declared control-freakery. According to Fraser, for example, the metaphor of the artist as prostitute is about \u201cthe intimate entanglement of personal\u00a0and market valuation that often drives participation in the art world\u2019s steeply stratified economy\u201d. One wonders if her texts, which are often laden with academese, don\u2019t befuddle as much as they demystify.Paradox is never far away from Fraser\u2019s work. In a\u00a0book-cum-artwork titled 2016 in Museums, Money, and\u00a0Politics, Fraser itemises the political-campaign contributions made by every board member of the top 128\u00a0art museums in America. Consisting of 944 pages of dense text with no pictures, 2016 explores the relationship between cultural and party-political clout. The dry, unsexy tome is unexpectedly spicy, and made a big splash on the coffee tables of art world insiders with its prurient insights into their neighbours\u2019 discretionary spending. Fraser is now working on a sequel, which examines the\u00a0shifts in spending in the year of Donald Trump\u2019s second presidential victory.The data compiled across her various works would make most people\u2019s heads spin, but Fraser finds terra firma in her love of memorisation, something she discovered at age 11 when learning Adrienne Rich poems by heart. Not only does Fraser memorise her performance scripts \u2013 the oldest of which she can still recite decades later \u2013 she has also committed long tracts by Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist of taste, to memory. In\u00a0his landmark book Distinction, Bourdieu builds a\u00a0monumental theory about social stratification on the key insight that education and \u201ccultural capital\u201d are in a\u00a0complex struggle with wealth and \u201ceconomic capital\u201d. Fraser\u2019s devotion to the late social theorist might be described as biblical. Bourdieu, in turn, once honoured Fraser as a cleric who knows that \u201creligion is the opium of the people\u201d but who continues her own priestly work, making \u201cthe socially unsayable actual and manifest\u201d. When asked about taste today, Fraser uses Bourdieu to interpret Trump\u2019s right-wing bling. \u201cIt evokes the style of old monarchies, everything in marble or gold but only\u00a0reproductions, because antiques are shabby. It\u2019s hilarious,\u201d she says. \u201cBut laughing at it reveals my sense of cultural superiority over a crass taste that flaunts wealth without refinement, sublimation or appreciation for history \u2013 all qualities associated with education.\u201d Of\u00a0course, the flip-side of Fraser\u2019s fascination with quiet luxury would be an alienation from loud luxury.Dictator-chic aside, Fraser sometimes shows a soft spot for conspicuous consumption. In one of the few physical art objects that she has made in the past 40\u00a0years, she collected hundreds of costumes abandoned after Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, then stacked them in a\u00a09ft-high sculpture called A Monument to Discarded Fantasies. In Portuguese, fantasias means both \u201ccostumes\u201d and \u201cfantasies,\u201d a semantic overlap (or pun?) that speaks to the power of clothes to alter realities.Fraser\u2019s most recent exhibition, held at Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris, marks another of the artist\u2019s rare forays into sculpture. Modestly scaled neoclassical figures fabricated from scratch (rather than assembled from found materials) would normally be a recipe for sales, but these five works, Untitled (Objects I-V), are perversely uncommercial. Displayed under clear Plexiglas covers, five life-sized naked toddlers lie in various sleepy positions with mottled grey complexions that suggest, to my eye, that they\u2019ve been dead for either 48 hours or 2,000 years. Are they uncanny literalisations of artworks as offspring, suggesting that Fraser\u2019s fecund relationship to making art has taken a macabre turn? Or\u00a0are they a puzzling feminist response to the curtailing of American women\u2019s rights not to bear children and the recent vilification of \u201cchildless cat ladies\u201d?Many years ago, when I was working on another project (a book called 33 Artists in 3 Acts), Fraser told me: \u201cOne of the core fantasies of artists is unconditional love and the associated unconditional value attributed to anything that we produce.\u201d Once I recalled the quote, I saw Objects I-V as metaphors for unconditional love and the inconsolable pain experienced when a loved one is lost. A riff on still lifes, or what the French call natures mortes, the sculptures also have a residue of guilt. They somehow embody the conflict of loathing the inequities that underpin the art market while attempting to sell something within it. The quintet of figures are not beautiful, but they do congeal into a sophisticated composition of austere dignity. They have tact, and grace, and quiet self-assurance. And they are so very far away from the passions of ordinary people. Sarah Thornton\u2019s latest book, Tits Up, is published by Pan\u00a0MacmillanStylist, Emma Wyman. Styling assistant, Verity Azario. Hair stylist, Lucas Wilson. Make-up artist, Emi Kaneko. Make-up assistant, Amelia Berger. Producer, Brock DeHaven. Production assistant, Sasha Peyton. Photographer\u2019s assistant, Aleck Venegas. Lighting technician, Butch\u00a0Hogan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cThis is a beautiful piece,\u201d says\u00a0Andrea Fraser, an artist with conflicted feelings about luxury goods and art markets. \u201cA\u00a0sophisticated composition of austere dignity,\u201d she continues slyly. We\u2019re on our third of three Zoom calls. Fraser is\u00a0in New York for her Phoebe Philo photoshoot, and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":298597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-298596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":298598,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298596\/revisions\/298598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}