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the attribution of value to art.

Question: Do critical discourses shape what artists do?

Relyea: No doubt, one major source of attributing value to modern art was critical discourse. Throughout modernism that discourses has often cohered around some concept of history. As with history writing in general, art history and criticism have often narrated the story of nationalities and communities, casting such actors as "the School of Paris," "the Harlem Renaissance," "the New York School" or "the American Action Painters." But now common identity, or a common medium like painting as a space for group experimentation, these commonalities have been dispersed, and the resulting atomized milling around of unanchored free agents is more conducive to the market than to critical dialogue. Today we have shows like Thelma Golden's "Freestyle," a "post-identity" exhibition devoted to African-American art, as well as "post-medium" exhibitions devoted to painting. A cavalcade of celebrities who just so happen to be black or Maoist or use photography or paint now makes Art. Medium-based histories are replaced by no history, the notion of the medium replaced by digitization's pure nonmedium. And in the meantime, a sense of static system grows more dominant in representations of art and the art world and the world in general. (I talk about systemization and art in

"Jeremy Blake Now Playing," http://www.feigencontemporary. com/index.php?mode=artists&obj ect_id=28&show=pressindividual &pressid=80.)

This is both good and bad news for artists. While artists today are enjoying the benefits of a more capacious art market and greater attention from museums and other arms of the global tourism industry, it also could be the case that they are left a bit more isolated and vulnerable too, as patronage grows more impersonal the more corporate and multinational it becomes.

Lawrence Alloway, who was keenly perceptive of the emerging institutional art system, remarked about this as early as 1964: "Once discovery used to carry with it certain assurances and safeguards for the artist and his public; now discovery is a form of classification with no reduction of the risks and solitude artists work in." In other words, where an artist once hoped to be embraced and championed by a dealer and some critics, and hence a certain public, today an artist hopes to be included in sprawling biennials and given projects by impersonal, corporate museums.

Unlike the old-fashioned critic and dealer, who would "stick

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