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Why and how do we work on living artists.

Article Excerpt
The essays in this forum were first presented on February 22, 2008, at the Annual Conference of the College Art Association in Dallas, Texas. Suzanne Hudson and Anne Byrd chaired the session, and Johanna Burton was the discussant. This session followed another chaired by Burton and Lisa Pasquariello Turvey in February 2004 at the CAA conference in Seattle, Washington, and published in the Fall 2005 pages of Art Journal, "Ask Somebody Else Something Else': Analyzing the Artist Interview." The present discussion picks up where that one left off. In the spirit of the proceedings, the essays presented here are close to the form of the original papers.

Origin stories often careen between the apocryphal and the out-and-out fabulist, but there is a pretty straightforward one regarding this forum. Or, better, a confluence of factors reinforced its timeliness. First, there was our growing awareness of the seemingly ubiquitous trend toward masters' theses, dissertations, and monographs written on living artists, a model--or at worst, fashion--to which Anne Byrd's and my own work are no exceptions. While this practice has been gaining a foothold in the American academy for some decades, it now seems almost requisite to work on a living artist. This despite the fact that it wasn't so long ago that these projects were seen as specious, not because such topics weren't worthy--although of course...

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