Joe: I want to focus on something else you've spoken about: the idea that the market will always adjust to the art that's being made. This idea runs contrary to what you're saying here about student art being directed so that curators, collectors, and gallerists can "understand it." Isn't this a backward approach to art-making? It strikes me as narrowing instead of widening.

Janusz: Of course it's narrowing. This approach revolves around the professionalization of art-making and around the enshrining of one's own ideologies in another generation in order to fortify them...
But I'll get back to that in a second... The idea that the art market will adjust to the art that's being made, comes from my reading of art history from the 60's and 70's... A lot of artists started making work that was specifically difficult to sell.  Robert Barry made a work roughly titled 'Crack in a Suburban Sidewalk...'  There was an uproar among European conceptual artists when they found out that Barry's dealer, an obviously creative businessman, had managed to sell the work for $10,000... The market had adapted...  But the market tends to gravitate towards the status quo, i.e. painting and flat works...

Joe: Why do you think today it's the other way around - where artists are having to adapt to what the market expects?

Janusz: The market can, and still does, adapt to very strange and challenging ways of art-making, but, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, right? And markets aren't fueled by vinegar. There is generally a tendency towards conservative artwork for the same reason we can't just switch to electric cars: people like the idea of change but they like comfort better…  Everyone loves the romance of a sudden revolution, but that's not realistic; as Mierle Laderman Ukeles said "After the revolution, who will do the laundry?"  That doesn't mean that I prefer easy to consume culture, or that I worship at the shrine of the individual. I personally like things that are challenging. Isn't the crux of your question 'why is it that people like to consume things that are easy and palatable?' and 'shouldn't schools direct students to make work that is mind bending?'  First, if you're asserting this, it sounds a little fascistic; second, I think promoting students to create strange and destabilizing artwork is exactly what a lot of grad programs actually do focus on, and third, I'm kind of down with a little Fascism in certain contexts. I have some beliefs that I think others 'should' share.

I find that your argument tends to oscillate between a belief that there should be more challenging artwork being made and another which asks, why is art so specialized; why can't it be understood by the common man; why does it have to be so dependent on certain networks of ideas?  One calls for a specialization and the other attacks it. Maybe that's the right approach.

Joe: Challenging doesn't equate specialization, as I see it. Andrea Fraser said that one development of institutional critique was the growing dominance of postmodern critical theory and academia in the art world, when, ultimately, what Fraser had hoped for was a critique of both. I think she was coming from a place that said: art doesn't have to be densely academic and theoretical to be challenging. This is something I agree with. However, a lot of Fraser's work has an obvious "biting the hand that feeds" jive. This trap irritates me: to critique the art institution you have to work to be included in it, to be inside of it. Seems like just another example of art's insularity.

Janusz: It seems like you're trying to find some way to make art that is outside of the 'art world.'  I'm not sure that makes sense. Are you trying to locate modes of making that don't rely on things called “art”? Are you just talking about counter-culture?

Jason Keller: Ahem – excuse me. Can I say something?

Joe: Hello? Who’s there?

Jason: It seems there is a misconception, or at least something tacitly agreed upon when we start from a conversation that assumes to interrogate a corpse with out first taking its pulse.

Joe: Jason Keller? Is that you? LA artist Jason Keller, ladies and gentlemen. Jason, I’m glad you could stop by. What were you saying?

Jason: That I don't celebrate nor believe in the death of the aesthetic experience but those who attempt to colonize and issue it to viewers through institutions should be seen for what they are: a business.
Fraser’s performances are a great example of somebody working and wedging their way into a bureaucratic system of exhibition, so she nuances the history, or as Janusz said, the full enshrining of older ideologies.

Joe: Jason, you said recently that MFA artists must “pull a Houdini” upon graduation. What did you mean by this?

Jason: The seriousness at which art takes itself is already a deeply suspicious position given how little at stake there is and how conservative artists are; i.e. how overly socialized they have become. I believe artists at best can pull a Houdini, and by that I mean territorialize something, perform it and as I have said, circulate their images like a currency which through time and reproduction begin to be exchanged by two separate parties other than the original issuer. The artist always 'profits' or at least benefits from the exchange. The artist then is the magician in ways, who create a trick and exploit it on the willingness of their viewers to love deception for its enchanting consequences.

Joe: Well, I have a question for the floor: Do you think young artists angle their work to be accepted into the art world/market? Is this fucked up or just protocol? How do you feel about young artists being encouraged to develop a unifying motif in grad school? Do you agree with it?

Janusz: In fact, much of this discussion has not made a distinction between, on the one hand, the support systems which are in place to trade and propagate art, as well as the institutions which are charged with the production of artists and, on the other hand, something we have not really talked about, the practice of making artwork...  I think the subtext of some of the above questions might be rephrased to ask: 'Is it worth making artwork, when all of this other stuff is at play as well?'

To sum up, I would agree if you look at art as a series of co-alienated protocols intended to increase an abstraction (value), or if you look at art schools as fortresses for status quo indoctrination, then yes... the prognosis is grim indeed... but...