Scores for a Museum Visitor
—Or Not
Maia Chao's Scores for the Museum Visitor from the 2026 Whitney BiennialJune 27, 2026 | by Anna Gregor
Whether or not it is an artwork, Maia Chao’s Scores for the Museum Visitor in the Whitney Biennial is, certainly, a symptom of our confusion about what an artwork is, which, while not necessarily sufficient to make it a work of art itself, is enough to “really make you think,” as museum visitors who don’t know what to say are wont to say—if only for thirty seconds, and not necessarily “really.”
Frankly, I haven’t been to the Biennial, so to avoid going against what I take to be a fundamental critical principle—that a work of art must be experienced firsthand—I’ll refrain from making an artistic judgment of the piece and will instead limit myself to thinking through the thoughts that it’s alleged to “make” museum visitors think in the terms it asks them to think in. That said, I suspect that, according to its organizing principle, Scores need not be experienced in person at all, and can be read, rather, from the comfort of your very screen. In which case I wouldn’t be betraying my critical principle, which could just as easily be stated: to experience a work of art is to see it as itself, according to its principle of organization. For an artwork is nothing if not an individual that reveals itself to us as thoroughly organized by its own logic.1
Accordingly, I feel free to represent the piece using the basic graphic tools of Google Docs:
The wall-textual presentation of Scores for the Museum Visitor might “make you think” about how museums teach us what to expect from art and how we are expected to behave, coercively and explicitly, through examples of good taste and under threat from the in-house police force of guards, and about the gap between our idealized expectations of art and our actual physical and emotional experience. Such institutions discipline our bodies, regulating behavior and thereby teaching us what it looks like to experience art: arms clasped, elbows tucked, walking at a slow but steady pace, pausing occasionally, briefly, to look intently or read a wall text, but never for too long nor too close, quietly, of course, save a polite sigh of transcendent joy or murmur of recognition.
So, too, we learn to perform such experiences even when, in reality, we are often not moved (Score #1), have the urge to act out (Score #2), are bored (Score #3), and/or wish whatever alleged wisdom we imagine the piece to possess could be directly transmitted to us through physical contact of our noggins with the object (Score #4). These performances that museums demand—or that visitors feel museums to demand—produce that discomfitting conflict between appearance and reality, bodily behavior and internal state, fitting in and feeling out. Museums breed, in a word, pretension.
In a charitable reading, Chao’s piece wants freedom from pretense, from the cultural charade performed daily in museums. Instead of historical context intended to help a visitor access an artwork, the piece provides “scores” intended to help them understand the expectations and regulations to which they’re subject. Therapy, of a sort, that, through self-awareness and subversion, brings us to see that we are in a museum-shaped cage. The visitor is prompted to parody clichés of aesthetic experience or to subvert codes of behavior. The vinyl rectangle serves as a surrogate artwork, a safe arena for acting out, like those rage cages you can rent to scream and smash objects (20 minutes for $70).
But, as Google AI warned me, unprompted, while I was confirming that such places exist, “While screaming and smashing items might feel temporarily satisfying, psychologists highlight that there is little evidence that this serves as a long-term mental health solution.”
Nor does Scores provide a solution, or even a picture of what the fulfillment of expectations and freedom from behavioral regulations might look like within the museum. We can extrapolate, however, based on the desires expressed in Scores—to be moved (Score #1), to touch (Score #2), to be entertained (Score #3), and passively receptive (Score #4)—that the reformed museum would be something closer to the Museum of Sex or Ice Cream, or maybe the Van Gogh Experience.
In a less charitable and more accurate read, Scores encourages viewers to mock the freedom that art can actually offer—transcendence, communion, and new possibilities—and permits them to merely play-act the physical freedoms usually denied them in art institutions—physical freedoms which, it needs saying, can be realized the moment one leaves the museum. It replaces pretension, which, for all its intolerability, at least retains the idea that there is something to be gained from art, with self-satisfied cynicism: “Weren’t we silly to think that art could give us what we wanted? We were all pretending to get it all along.”
Indeed, the empty vinyl rectangle is not a stand-in for any piece. It is a claim that every piece, art itself, is empty.
Like all wall texts, which fail to help a viewer further into the experience of an artwork, but rather point away from it, to authority-approved contexts or narratives, Chao’s Scores fail to point beyond the cage to show the visitor how to make the most of their time with the artworks within the museum. According to Scores, all that is left for us in the museum is performance, pretension. The possibilities of transformation, discovery, stimulation, and communion—the ideal desires behind the scores—are foreclosed. The realization proper to the logic of this piece, insofar as we can say it has a logic of its own apart from the assumptions of its intended audience, is to leave the museum to do something that you actually want to do.
Scores, I wager, did not make many think this far, not only because there was no stream of visitors exiting the museum, but because artworks can’t “make you think” anything. You have to do the thinking yourself.
I am not questioning whether institutional critique is efficacious or whether the uneasy collaboration between institution and critic is little more than a superficially conciliatory circle-jerk for artworld audiences already indoctrinated by postmodern discourse. There are successful instances of institutional critique that ask questions about and reveal how structures of power shape museums, or that propose how art institutions ought to change by picturing possibilities for a more ideal art-viewing environment. But Chao’s piece doesn’t ask those questions. There is no historical plumbing of museum collections and curatorial narratives, as in Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum; no parody of an elite class’s pretension to educating the taste of the poor, as in Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk; no making labor visible, as in Dave McKenzie’s inconveniently timed window cleaning in Disturbing the View at the Whitney. Chao’s Scores for the Museum Visitor doesn’t “make us think”—doesn’t think itself about these higher-order structural questions, remaining, instead, on the level of visitor experience: parodying the unrealized ideals of transformation, discovery, stimulation, and communion, while encouraging the vices—yes, vices—of inattention, acting out, boredom, and passivity. Far from raising consciousness, it stunts.
The question that Scores asks is: “You don’t really want to be here, do you?”
And its rhetorical position encourages us to answer, “Well, not really, if this is all there is.”
The only awareness it can offer visitors is that they would, indeed, rather be doing something else. If taken to heart, this could save them hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars in museum admission costs and hours of their lives. But it probably won’t, since this realization is undercut by the self-satisfaction of an inside joke that, after a chuckle, fails to dislodge most from the circumambulating stream of museum traffic. And for those who answer that they do want to be here, that they’re searching for something, even if they have never been taught what it is or how to access it, the piece has nothing to offer.
If, at this point, we really do keep thinking, we might wonder: What does a museum have to offer us? Why are we here? The pretension and surveillance and throngs of tourists and aching feet and backs and lack of benches and water fountains and bathrooms and over air conditioning and shrieking babies and pushy tour guides and gift shops and photoshoots really are discouraging.
Access.
Museums offer us access to artworks. Mere physical access.—Not access to all artworks that we ought to be able to see, which is why Wilson’s curatorial interventions resonate. Nor does mere vicinity to artworks serve a social good in the way that other municipal services, like those rendered in hospitals and orphanages, do, as Fraser’s tour makes clear. Nor is the museum a room with a view to relax with a coffee and a croissant after some pleasurable time spent among pretty things, as McKenzie’s window washing reminds us.
The museum’s function is solely to allow us to be in front of an artwork that, otherwise, we would never be able to see. A museum is a library of the singular, unreproducible, physical objects that are artworks.
Obviously, a library can’t do the reading for you. You can’t absorb the books on the shelf by merely circumambulating the stacks and admiring the dust jackets. Nor can a librarian tell you what a book is about, except in paraphrase, if she’s happened to read it. Nor will information about the author or the historical context replace the actual reading. The library provides mere access to books. It is responsible for allowing you to choose a book, for ensuring that you can reach it, and that there are comfortable places to sit in a quiet environment. But you must bring the attention, and give it the time. And most importantly, you have to be able to read.
Museums have not figured out how to teach us to read artworks, because, I suspect, most people who work in museums don’t know how to read them themselves. So a slew of “educational programs” are developed, a shell of “educational materials” built up around the artworks, a gift shop, or multiple, stocked so that, even if you don’t feel like you got it, you did get a mug, and that’s about the same, isn’t it? But docents, wall texts, audio guides, QR codes, and mugs can’t teach us to read. They don’t make the work more accessible once we have physical access to it. Only you can truly access it, with time and attention. And only once you’ve learned to read.
What makes this so confusing is that, unlike reading books, there is no one artistic language to study, which, having mastered it, enables you to decipher all the artworks in the museum. Each artwork has its own language. Its language is its logic, its singular form.
This kind of reading sounds like a lot of work, I know. It is. So, why would we make the effort to learn to read an artwork? What do they have to offer us?
There are many terms to use to describe it, but in this essay, in light of Chao’s piece, freedom is most apt: a special freedom coincident with the apprehension of an individual work with a logic so through-expressed that we glimpse a new possibility for meaning-making. We apprehend a new coherence within our distracted and fragmented world and are experientially reassured that the world can be coherent; that there is more to our experience than what seem like arbitrary social norms and obscure forces of power; that new meaning is possible in spite of these; that things can change.
So Scores for the Museum Visitor does get something right: an artwork shows us freedom, and this freedom is in conflict with the institutional structure built up around the piece that we must enter to access it. It also gets right the fact that many museum visitors would rather not be there. And this is okay. For those who thought through Scores and discovered that they really would rather be at the Museum of Sex, or having a picnic with their family, or taking a Jazzercize class, or destroying vases in a rage cage—cheers! No one ever said that art has dominion over meaning. Art ought to be accessible to anyone. But it is not on that account for everyone.
I end this essay not with a score to perform, but a generalized description of how to find a path, a way into any artwork. It is a guide for learning the language of an individual piece, for discovering its logic.
Sometimes, we don’t discover the logic of a piece. This may well be our fault, because we were achy, or hungry, or unfocused, unable to overcome the hostile environment that museums so often are. But, alternatively, we may be convinced that it is the piece that failed to develop itself, to follow out its own logic, to speak coherently so we could learn what it has to say. In these latter cases, we are free to claim that such “artworks” are not art at all.—A judgment that is provisional and subject to later revision, but which is right now felt to be true and felt that it ought to be true for anyone who experiences that piece. The sense that we can see the same world and the desire to share it are fundamental to experiences of artworks. We doom ourselves to mere performance, self-isolation, if we assume that museums, galleries, and auction houses are the arbiters of what is or isn’t art, what is good or bad.
Modernism and postmodernism have revealed to us that we are the arbiters of art: You are; I am. When anything, including wall texts, can be art, art judgments must be controversial—as with all judgments that call for consensus in a plurivocal world. The museum can be authoritarian, if we want it to be, choosing to submit ourselves to its idea of art. Or we can treat it as a library, a forum through which to access individual artworks, sites of potential communion, in order to make judgments, claims about how the world ought to be, and, perhaps, write criticism, the means of showing others a picture of a world we share, or could.
~
WARNING: Sitting for hours to look at an artwork, no matter how carefully you choose a position that is respectfully out of the way, encourages performances on the part of museum visitors that are more inventive, more unhinged, than anything a performer of Chao’s scores could dream up. You may observe, e.g., visitors hovering around you, since everyone will suddenly want to look at the painting you’re looking at, or taking pictures of you out of curiosity; some (white men, usually) threatening you physically for taking up “public space” or standing directly in front of you, in an upright version of manspreading; guards hovering suspiciously, barking when a pointing finger extends a bit beyond the stanchion, or harassing you for monopolizing a piece, even when no other visitors are in the gallery; visitors accosting you with historical facts or asking questions as if you’re an authority; and of course, people performing acrobatics to take selfies or pictures of the wall text exactly where you’re standing, even when you’re off to the side. If you truly want to subvert museum behavioral norms, actually look at an artwork. Just, for God’s sake, do not block the wall text
1 Such a requirement obviously excludes much, if not most, of what we call art today. But only we can see whether an artwork approaches such a degree of coherence, which means that only we—you and I, and anyone else who experiences a piece—can judge whether it deserves the name Art. Institutions can only pretend to this role.
About the Author:
Anna Gregor is a painter who occasionally writes about Paintings. Her essays can be read in The Revenant Quarterly, Caesura, and Two Coats of Paint.