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it out to the end" with the artists they adopted, biennials and museums don't get into a personal pact with young artists, they treat young artists as disposable, a content provider. (For more on art and tourism see my review of

"Universal Experience," http://www.artforum.com/inprin t/issue=200506.)

Question: Is art created for theory or is theoretical practice different than criticism?

Relyea: This seems a paradox - how can art criticism be withering when more and more art appears conceptually based and theoretically informed? But this also has to do with the growing institutionalization of new art and young artists. Artists learn theory in art school, where they are trained in and need to show talent for discourse. Just look at the ubiquity of the group critique and artist-talks in art schools. It is now standard practice in M.F.A. programs that students produce a written thesis in order to graduate. But the mission of art schools and university M.F.A. programs is founded on a contradiction: while university instruction and learning depend upon the verbalization of knowledge, no dean or professor will ever so defile the mystique of art by proposing that it can be reduced to a set of teachable formulas. The M.F.A. curriculum is thus cleaved between group interaction and the production of language on the one hand - the crits, the visiting-artist talk, the seminar - and private, individual studio time on the other. While the former space, defined by public position taking, accords well with the school's mandates and institutional authority, the studio is crucial as well. It's where the artist, silent and unobserved, manufactures art in the very image of individuality - that is, makes it unique, different from that of other students.

All this contributes to integrating art schools all the more fully into the circuitry of the art world (museums and galleries now often expect artists to write their own press releases, sometimes their own catalog texts). But it also can create a seeming antagonism between theory and art. This is one of the catastrophes of trying to overly professionalize art - this splitting of making and thinking in the M.F.A. system. The idea of art bringing theory and practice together is such an important aspect of the modern era. During the first half of the 20th century art critics treated the theory-practice problem from the viewpoint of Marxist debates over whether to entrust revolution in the top-down dictating of party theorists or in the

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