The Interview as Criticism: David Sylvester's Artist Interviews

Abstract

A regular feature of art publications and gallery event programs, the artist interview has in recent years become a significant part of what Robert Morris has called the "being-an-artist game." In response to this development, scholars such as Christoph Lichtin have sought to theorize the various forms that the artist interview takes, while the interview strategies of particular artists have also proved fertile ground for art historians. In this article, I take the less-traveled path of surveying the artist interviews of a particular interviewer, the art critic David Sylvester. These I understand as working in two ways: as an information-centered form of documentation and as an extension of Sylvester's criticism. The latter I believe to be of particular significance, as a strategy of both addressing the declining prestige of mainstream art criticism since the mid-twentieth century and as an antidote to the repetitive and generic interviews that characterize much current art discourse.