Disrupting the traditional artist-journalist relationship was, evidently, a start. (This article, I should add, began in a traditional way, with a publicist for Performance Space pitching it to me.)

When the group told me now was my chance to “state” any questions, I read the ones I had prepared. For example: “How did you all come to be here together?” and “What can the public expect to engage with here?” They responded by scribbling illegibly, saying “excellent questions” and returning to their script.

This made my job more difficult, but the underlying message resonated: the insistence on reallocating power. We don’t need institutions (mainstream press included), the artists seemed to be saying; institutions need us. When they asked me, “Do you feel welcome?” I reflexively said yes, though I didn’t, at least not in the way I usually do when institutions ask me to write about them. And that, I think, was the point: to destabilize who is customarily let in, welcomed, and how.

Earlier that day in a one-on-one interview, equally unconventional, Ms. Michelson spoke about her frustrations with “the world that treats artists as pets in every way.” Known for challenging institutional norms in her own work of the past 30 years — including the role of the press; she often asks not to be reviewed — she invited me to sit by her side as she read from her laptop and occasionally bellowed “Back up!” (“Every now and then I might yell,” she had warned me.)