Contemporary art institutions increasingly frame themselves as adaptive, porous, and research-driven, yet their operational logic reveals a persistent contradiction between openness and control. Through the lens of institutional metabolism, it becomes possible to interrogate how organisations such as MoMA and Tate absorb practices that initially emerge as infrastructural, networked, or resistant to object-based display. These institutions do not merely exhibit artworks; they metabolise them, converting epistemic risk into stabilised cultural value. What enters the museum is rarely the operative method itself, but a resolved residue suitable for historicisation. Friction is thus not eliminated but processed, transformed into discourse, pedagogy, or archival material. The danger lies in mistaking this transformation for critical validation, when in fact it often signals the neutralisation of the work’s infrastructural agency.
