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to be still a product of a kind of religious guilt complex when it comes to money-taking their vows of poverty in a different way, in a middle-class way rather than in a religious way, you might say. Q: I've been wondering about that, in that sense. You have certain resources that if they're available to you, ... you have the potential to change your situation, your location. You gain access to other resources.... RS: You can always apply for grants or something like that. Q: But if you do this sort of thing, you make a sacrifice. You give up one to get the other.... RS: Yeah. A painting is actually an accepted convention. Art is really a portable commodity as it now stands. If you want to alter that commodity value, then you have to find an alternative. On one level you might say that I'm dealing with real estate rather than commodities, or at least attempting to, which is very difficult, because the powers that be, the Rockefellers, would rather have commodity art, portable objects, exchange items. If you consider abstract painting, to a great extent, on a really economic level it comes super-currency for a privileged class. So you put your paintings in a gallery and hope that somebody will come along and out of whim will see some magical element in that thing and say they want it. Most people have to be content with standard currency, standard realistic portraits on dollar bills. [Laughter] Andy Warhol was actually aware of that when he pointed out the representation of commodities in terms of dollar bills, soup cans, people. They're simply commodities, if you want to look at it that way. These are interesting problems. But bourgeois society will install in the bourgeois artist a sense of guilt about this in order to keep him in his studio knocking out super-currency for the privileged few. So in a way the Museum of Modern Art is a kind of bank. These forms bear, the things that are represented, whether they be realistic or abstract, they're still representations, psychic representations out of your psychology. In other words when you make a stripe on your canvas, in a sense, that's a form of reductive representation. Q: [Inaudible about the emerging role of institutions of art and artists?] RS: I would like to see artists as completely autonomous. Most of them imagine they are but they aren't, because you have a whole institutional value determining the conventions for this seemingly unconventional behavior. This is what anthropology is about, or structuralism. It's about the interdependency, the totems and taboos of societal groups, whether they're farmers or artists or manufacturers. Each group has a particular kind of value sense. The controlling value right now is modernist art history. The institutional pattern is essentially based on the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art is the originator of the institution. Now that's in terms of modernist art. Then you have, let's say, classical, or Renaissance art, which is something more like the Metropolitan Museum. A museum like this [the Art Institute of Chicago] is patterned after the Metropolitan. It's a different kind of value, a different kind of history again. The way all 11
