BENHAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH  That is easy to answer because it is a total cliché. Like many critics, I wanted to become a painter. I painted until I was in my late teens, and then I applied to the Art Academy of Düsseldorf. However, since I was not accepted, I decided instead to become an art history and literature major in Berlin, in 1962. A lot of people might not imagine or even know this, but it was not possible to study modern art in Germany at that time. There was only one chair for 20th century art in Bochum, held by the famous professor Max Imdahl. So that was the only institution, and post-war art was nowhere to be taught. I moved to London for a while in 1971, trying to write, and then moved back to Germany in 1972, and worked with Rudolf Zwirner in his gallery for three years, which was incredibly important for me. That was how, in 1975, I did a couple of exhibitions with artists like Dan Graham, Marcel Broodthaers, or Richard Tuttle. And I also did the first major Sigmar Polke exhibition in Düsseldorf, which included a big catalogue. This came to the attention of the faculty at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, and I started teaching there afterwards. But in 1977, I would become the Editor of the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, in Canada, as the successor of Kasper König, and this also entailed a teaching position. This would lead to my transition into the United States. I taught in California for a while, and then I went back to school at the City University of New York, studying with Rosalind Krauss and Linda Nochlin, where I did my PhD in 1994 on Gerhard Richter, the first conclusion of a very long interest and friendship with him, which has been central to my life in many ways. But, in fact, I had started teaching at CalArts in 1981. I loved that school. It was a fantastic environment, with extraordinary people and students. But I moved to New York because my wife, an artist at that time, Louise Lawler, did not enjoy living in Los Angeles. So, then I started teaching at the State University of New York, which was a rough public university, where I also ran a gallery space with some interesting exhibitions. After that, I started teaching at the Art and Architecture Department at MIT, and then went back to New York once again to teach at Columbia University and at Barnard College. Finally, I moved to Harvard in 2005, until I stopped teaching in 2020. That was my trajectory, more or less, roughly speaking.

BHDB  I basically agree with you. When I moved to North America, I was living and working in Halifax, which gave me the opportunity to go to New York regularly, to meet people and to see exhibitions all the time. But at that point, you would not have called this the hub of the culture industry or the high centre of the art industry yet. Romanticizing as that might sound, New York in the late 1970s was very, very far from what it is now. There was an entire generation of artists, including those whose books I was publishing as their editor at the time, such as Martha Rosler, Jenny Holzer, Dara Birnbaum, or Dan Graham, who lived under incredibly modest circumstances. They had no market at all. It is important to recognize that we are not talking about 2026. In the late 1970s, all of the contradictions, configurations and conflicts between artistic practices and the art market were still rather vast. It was not as homogenized and unified as it appears now. Even at that time, somebody like Richard Serra or Robert Morris would show with Leo Castelli, but they were by no means established or presented as the grand masters that they are now perceived to be. It was a much more open and fluid situation, with all sorts of intersections between Fluxus, minimalist and post-minimalist artists, even if, by that time, Pop art was already way out on the market. And certainly, when it came to the next generation of conceptual artists, with people like Lawrence Weiner and Dan Graham, whom I was very close to and friends with, they were nowhere to be seen as figures in the market. It was not the monolithic culture industry one may think it was.

BHDB  I’m amazed to hear that I already wrote this in 2012! I keep saying it every day. But in fact, this would be much more complicated now. Well, the first major retrospective exhibition of conceptual art was curated by Claude Gintz in Paris, in 1989. I am not sure that, at that moment, one could say that conceptual and post-conceptual practices had been commodified. They were well-established, but they were also being superseded, or contradicted, by the re-emergence of painting. In the 1990s, if not even earlier, the regime of conceptual art was massively overturned by the return to figuration with Cifra in Italy, neo-expressionism in Germany or the corresponding practices in the US, for instance. The first wave of the return to figurative painting would probably be the first indication of a massive mobilization of collecting as a speculative investment. You cannot really speculate with conceptual art that well. Without idealizing it falsely, conceptual art still has a historical dialectic in play when it challenges the concept of art itself, the condition of the object, and the distribution form of the work, therefore also challenging its very commodity status. As long as there was a post-minimal and conceptual practice in place as a determinant paradigm of artistic practice, the balance between the highly commercial art world and the relatively radical neo-avant-garde sphere was still in a dialectical tension. But the restoration of painting was the first chapter of when these things shifted, though it also related to some of the major auction sales that happened at the time. That is when things really shifted into a totally different direction. It suddenly became apparent to a wider group of collectors and amateurs that the art market would displace the sphere of cultural production as a sphere of social, ideological critique and contestation. I’m not blaming painting for it. But it was the messenger of a transformation in the principles of thinking about artistic practices.

BHDB  The essay that I wrote in 1981, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression’, basically demarcates this transition that we are discussing. It tries to historicize the return to figurative painting from the perspective of conceptual and post-conceptual practices. It tries to challenge its viability and credibility. But of course, it was overly Don Quixotesque of me to think that this essay could have ever had that impact. It was obviously an overestimation of the critic’s power, and it was a bit naïve on that level.