Talking to Artists: In-depth Interviews,Cultural Objects,and a Sociology of Art (History) Methodology

Abstract

A key dilemma for researchers analyzing in-depth interviews is how to sensitively and responsibly interpret and incorporate the layers of meaning present in any one interview. References to cultural objects during interviews are moments that invite interpretive multiplicity. This article examines the presence of cultural objects within interview research as a methodological issue. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with artists and designers, this article approaches references to artworks during interviews as more than just evidence of cultural capital, status, and boundary-making. Interview participants talked about art because it was meaningful to them and provided another language for expressing complicated ideas about their artistic identities and careers. To better access this aesthetic and symbolic content within the analysis of interview themes, this article sketches out a sociology of art (history) methodology that illustrates how to blend sociological and art historical interpretation.

I have been studying the job of creativity and those who work in creative professions for some time. A key part of this research has involved conducting in-depth interviews with artists and designers about their day-to-day work. During one long, conversational interview with Yan, a mixed media artist with an active exhibition record and international profile, he regularly referenced specific artworks to describe the dilemmas of being a professional artist. He devoted notable attention to an art project by the contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ne travaillez jamais, 2007, that had activated local public debate. Yan used this project to explore and dissect his own ambivalence about the job of art, the uncertainties of artistic identity, and the expectations placed on artists as cultural mediators. The relevance of these themes to our interview, however, became much clearer later, after I conducted my own research into the artwork. It was markedly meaningful to Yan and central to our discussion, but it wasn’t entirely clear to me how without a stronger understanding of the artwork in question. ¹

Other participants for this research project had the same habit: to draw on artworks that are meaningfully connected to descriptions of their working lives as artists. While a staple premise within the sociology of art is that these types of references are displays of cultural capital that inform artistic status and boundary-making around valuable practices, such an approach limits how to recognize the interplay of aesthetics, emotions, and cultural objects within interview research. Within the interview context, these artworks genuinely meant something to each participant; they had emotional and aesthetic resonance (McDonnell et al., 2017). Thus, as a researcher, how do I take such emotional and aesthetic connections seriously as part of the interview content?

One of the big dilemmas of in-depth interview research is how to sensitively and responsibly interpret and incorporate the layers of meaning present in any one interview. Questions of meaning can be especially fraught when dealing with cultural objects (Benzecry, 2015), and social science research interested in questions of culture and collective meaning continues to debate the theoretical and empirical challenges of its systematic study (McDonnell, 2023; Rawlings & Childress, 2021). While these questions are often yoked to wider epistemological discussions, this article concentrates on a more everyday challenge of qualitative research: the tension between the complexity of interview data and its representation in research. Specifically, I am responding to ongoing scholarly attention to the role of culture and cultural meaning within interview-based research projects. Considerable work on cultural dynamics within interviews has rightfully addressed issues of cross-cultural exchange, negotiating cultural differences, and power-status dynamics within researcher and participant relationships (e.g., Bayeck, 2021; Kim, 2023; Liamputtong, 2022; Hutchinson & Pelzang, 2018; Vähäsantanen & Saarinen, 2013); furthermore, these concerns have clear relevance to ongoing efforts to decolonize and indigenize social science methods (L. T. Smith, 1999; Wilson, 2008). These contributions sit alongside more scrutiny of interviews as a dominant qualitative research method (Potter & Hepburn, 2012; Silverman, 2017).

Here, in response to these wider questions of culture, interpretation, and meaning shadowing the interview as a method, this article turns to the example of how cultural objects feature in research interviews. Specifically, I examine artists talking about art as an important part of the emotional and aesthetic content of the in-depth interview—content that can be strengthened in the interview analysis via supplementary research on the artwork in question. While I will model this approach using artworks, it could apply to any number of other creative cultural objects (e.g., music, film, novels, and theater) and employ a diversity of interpretive approaches under the wide banner of visual methodologies (Rose, 2012).

The first section of this article reviews cultural sociology and sociology of art literature on art, cultural analysis, and interpretation, with specific attention to debates on interviews as a method for studying culture. As a practical intervention in these debates, I propose a sociology of art (history) methodology that is attentive to discursive and objectified meaning. Next, drawing on semi-structured in-depth interview data from a larger project, I present three examples that illustrate how to productively connect artworks and interview data; in this case, the art objects help to explain difficult professional experiences and conflicted emotions about creative identities and the organization and evaluation of creative labor. While questions of meaning always accompany qualitative inquiry, symbolic, intertextual content is often the hardest to identify and analyze. This article provides an example of how to create a stronger dialogue between objectified meaning/encoded cultural meaning and interview participants’ perspectives, where the art object enhances and brings needed complexity to the analysis of interview themes.

Cultural Meaning, Objects, and Interviews

Art Talk

Talking about art plays an important role in understanding art and aesthetic experience. There is keen sociological interest in the role of critics and criticism within cultural domains—for example, art, literature, food, and music—because of its potential for insights into group style, aesthetic sensibilities, and processes of valuation and evaluation (Chong, 2020; Johnston & Baumann, 2007; Wohl, 2015). Art talk is crucial to the construction of artistic meaning and the organization of practices: “art words, are so important to the study of art worlds” (Cluley, 2012, p. 203). Or as Fine (2018) puts it, “art embraces the visual, not the aural or linguistic, and yet it has become a world of arguments” (p. 135), in no small part because concept-driven contemporary art practices make the communication and interpretation of meaning more challenging. To address this uncertainty, Wohl’s (2021, p. 272) study of contemporary art criticism illustrates how spatial metaphors are employed to create links between histories, concepts, and artistic practices, thus helping critics to communicate conceptual meaning and interpretive multiplicity. Art criticism especially “functions as an interpretative and intermediary link between specific artworks and an audience, but also provides insight into the variety of categories used within the art world to distinguish art from non-art” (Roose et al., 2018, p. 304). Yet art criticism is increasingly less formal than in the past; social media opens up a wider array of critical voices with varying proximity to art scenes and markets (Hanrahan, 2013). The sociology of culture’s attention to art criticism has fruitfully underscored the role art markets, institutions, and intermediaries play in stabilizing the uncertain meaning and value of artistic goods, but more recent scholarship points to the need for more attention to (a) variations in types of arts discourse that inform the critical field (public–private; traditional vs. social media; formal–informal; insiders–outsiders) and (b) the relationship between arts discourses and art objects, where rethinking such intersections opens up larger questions about interpretation, aesthetics, agency, and cultural objects. Thus, this article builds on both directions, with an eye to complementary work from cultural sociology generally, and the sociology of art specifically.

Alongside this emphasis on talk, there is general agreement that sociology should take objects more seriously in cultural analysis (Benzecry, 2015; Cerulo, 2018; Childress, 2017; Domínguez & Rubio, 2014) and a redress is underway. As McDonnell (2023) puts it, “the study of cultural objects and their materiality has moved to the center of cultural sociology” (p. 195). Yet how to do so draws on different lineages within cultural sociology, sociology of art, and cultural studies. The intersection of objectified meaning, interactional meaning, and individual-level cultural meaning remains more elusive for researchers to empirically study such that “the relationship between how the institutionalized and objectified culture that may be stored in objects may or may not interact with the culture of individuals and interactions is still an open question” (Rawlings & Childress, 2021, p. 1446). There is deep variation in types of cultural objects studied, including scents (Cerulo, 2018), novels (Childress, 2017), songs (Schwarz, 2015), posters (McDonnell, 2010), football jerseys (Benzecry, 2008), and blue jeans (Miller & Woodward, 2012), but in terms of the study of works of art, the conversation necessarily turns to the distinctiveness of artistic objects, aesthetics, and affect.

A defining feature of a reinvigorated sociology of art is its willingness to “grapple with the aesthetic properties of art, including re-examining the vexed question of the work itself” (De La Fuente, 2007, p. 410). V. D. Alexander and Bowler (2018, pp. 325–326) advance an “aesthetically inflected sociology of the arts that includes aesthetic objects and discourses as a key point of analysis.” Yet how to understand the location of artistic meaning is not easily resolved. While reconceptualizing meaning as an emergent process is key to this shift (Eyerman & McCormick, 2006), the tension between meaning emanating from the object and meaning emanating from the audience and interaction remains. Art is an exemplary case study for such questions because of its flexibility, its uncertain value, and its deliberate construction such that art is a particular type of public culture (Lizardo, 2017). Its study puts on display how groups make meaning out of collective representations in everyday life; for example, the collective aesthetic judgment upheld by groups is a deeply sociological process (Wohl, 2015). Art also illustrates the work of aesthetic power, even agency, of artistic objects within the social realm (DeNora, 2000; Domínguez Rubio, 2014) and their distinctive qualities such as iconicity (J. C. Alexander, 2008) or resonance (McDonnell et al., 2017). Objects anchor meaning in distinctive ways, where the affordances of art and the encoding of aesthetic content can direct but not ensure some interpretations over others. These more recent directions within cultural sociology and the sociology of art emphasize the importance of not reducing objects to discourse or elevating them above discourse and social interaction; instead, what we see is more attention and innovation around how to map out the mutually constituting nature of aesthetic-material and social-relational meanings of art. This, in part, is a product of renewed engagement with shared concerns and lineages of art history and sociology (V. D. Alexander & Bowler, 2018; De la Fuente, 2007; Tanner, 2003).

What About Interviews?

These wider questions of how to interpret culture and collective meaning sociologically have implications for interview methods. While there is a lively, ongoing debate around what sort of research questions and analysis interview-based methods can best support, here I target the variability of cultural meaning in interviews. Culture, of course, can refer to many things in interview research. The broad umbrella of culture includes beliefs, attitudes, everyday practices, popular culture, artistic culture, mundane and sacred objects; culture intersects with key features of social identity such that the complexity of the term is often central to its study. While culture can be explicitly studied—a part of findings and analysis—it is always part of interview context and rapport, regardless of the research topic or intent. Accordingly, the literature on qualitative interviews is vast, and using culture as a qualifier does not narrow it down significantly given the relevance of the question across the social sciences. The role of cultural dynamics within interviews is a well-recognized area of scholarly attention, with methodological literature on negotiating cultural differences, cross-cultural contexts, researcher–participant cultural dynamics, and power differentials, all of which have been extremely important and fruitful areas of consideration for qualitative researchers (Gubrium & Holstein, 2012). Better acknowledging the role of culture within research design, interview practices, and data interpretation has been essential for building critical reflexivity within interview methods (Riach, 2009; Rogers et al., 2021). In light of the above dialogues and the need for specificity around examples, this article concentrates on the friction between culture and interview methods within cultural sociology specifically.

In cultural sociology where questions of meaning are front and center, interview data is positioned as a rich resource for unpacking social scripts, cultural frames, and collective representations, however fragile or conflicted (Swidler, 2003). Yet the purpose of research interviews has been under renewed scrutiny within sociology. For both ethical and methodological reasons, researchers regularly need to revisit how and why we conduct interviews, especially when technology and an expansive digital landscape offer new methods and near innumerable data points for cultural analysis (Mohr et al., 2020, p. 14). Culturally attuned perspectives on the value of interviews for accessing collective meaning have been increasingly open to debate, feeding into wider issues of theory and methodology in the discipline. Provocative dismissals such as Martin’s (2010) assessment, “if we want to learn about culture, the last thing we should do is to conduct in-depth interviews with a selection of informants” (p. 238) aside, interview methods quickly slide into deep conceptual and interpretive disagreements over access to meaning and perspectives on culture (cognitive vs. culturalist; attitudes vs. action; quantitative vs. qualitative). Interviews, as many scholars have argued, tell us little about social action: “self-reports of attitudes and behaviors are of limited value in explaining what people actually do because they are overly psychological and abstracted from lived experience” (Jerolmack & Khan, 2014, p. 181). Other methods, like Vaisey’s (2009) influential dual process model of culture in action, have rethought the dominance of interviews or ethnographies for studying culture; instead, while Vaisey (2014) recognizes that interviews have a place, he argues that quantitative methods can better get at cognitive mechanisms that underlie action. Whether or not interviews effectively capture cultural schemas—or even how to define schemas—is key to this debate. As Leschziner and Brett (2021) succinctly explain, at issue is not only different interpretations of cultural schemas (culturalist vs. cognitive) but also how these become a proxy for culture. Against this questioning of the purpose of research interviews are calls for greater methodological innovation and empirical demonstration in cultural analyses (Cerulo, 2018; McDonnell, 2023; Mohr et al., 2020; Rawlings & Childress, 2021).

Yet the defense of the interview method for accessing and studying culture is also vigorous. As Lamont and Swidler (2014) explain, the stress on behavior as the foremost insight from interviews is misguided:

We promote a more open-ended and pragmatic approach to interviewing, one where we aim to collect data not only, or primarily, about behavior, but also about representations, classification systems, boundary work, identity, imagined realities and cultural ideals, as well as emotional states. (p. 157)

In terms of the sociology of art, for example, Gerber’s (2017) interviews with over 80 artists, from hobby artists to professionals, identified a fourfold typology of accounts of artistic value that artists employ to explain their creative labor, demonstrating how aesthetic and market orientations co-exist. These interviews reveal with nuance and detail how artists assess and evaluate dimensions of artistic production. There is room, as demonstrated by Rinaldo and Guhin (2022), to better distinguish modes of cultural meaning in interviews such as by distinguishing between aspects such as macro and meso-level modes of public culture.

Accordingly, the interview format invites multiplicity in how it can define and represent culture—this is either considered a strength or weakness, depending on your theoretical and methodological orientations. As Pugh (2013) argues, what makes interviews sociologically rich is often missed: “scholars misrecognize a fundamental characteristic of in-depth interviews: they can access different levels of information about people’s motivation, beliefs, meanings, feelings and practices—in other words, the culture they use—often in the same sitting” (p. 49); this is especially important in terms of the expression and interpretation of emotional content (p. 44). As Illouz (2008) elegantly describes the relationship between culture and emotion: “emotions are cultural meaning and social relationships that are closely and inextricably compressed together (p. 11). Aesthetic experience is also part of this emotional registrar; thus, by this line of approach, interviews remain important to understanding dimensions of aesthetic encounters tied to cultural objects.

In sum, the in-depth interview still has its place in the sociological study of culture, and methodological innovations have been reconceptualizing understanding, for example, between cognition and culture. Here, however, I turn to a more practical intervention by putting a staple from qualitative research (in-depth interview) in dialogue with a staple of art history (art criticism and related texts).

A Sociology of Art (History) Methodology

It is possible to read any number of sociological studies of art that make no meaningful reference to art objects. Let me use my own research as an example. The interviews I am drawing on for this article were part of a wider study of contemporary creativity, creative work, and art schools in Canada (Liinamaa, 2022), but art was somehow the absent star of the show. In addition to participant observation and institutional document analysis, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with over 50 artists and designers who worked at art schools about their working lives as artists and teachers. While I did look at art and spend time in art studios and other sites of production, there are only passing references to actual works of art in this larger study. While this was justified in the theoretical framework and methodology, as someone who trained in art history first and sociology later, I haven’t stopped thinking about the tensions between the materiality of art, its aesthetic, its symbolic character, and its representation and interpretation within sociological research. This article started with a curiosity: what if I gathered all the references to specific artworks from my interview data?

The premise of my approach is that artists talk about art in many ways, but there is considerable variation within how these references matter both in terms of the interview context/interactional dynamic and in the analysis of the interview. I am concerned with the practical problem of how to better capture the affective and symbolic content of interviews. Specifically, the moments when a participant indicates both through verbal and non-verbal cues that a particular artwork really matters to them—it is especially meaningful to their identity and experience. This is not the case with all artistic references; the literature cited above illustrates well the role of art objects and art talk in terms of interactional and situational meaning-making, social status, and symbolic boundaries. But there is something about the non-public (unlike the artist’s talk, art crit, or gallery opening), one-on-one formal yet semi-structured interview format that invites, at times, a different sort of tone and discussion. Accordingly, to better access the layered meanings of art as a cultural reference point during interviews, this paper incorporates material about the artwork into the analysis of the interview data I collected. ² By conducting research on the artworks that participants used to describe or emphasize aspects of their artistic careers, the ensuing discussion demonstrates how the symbolic content of the work of art brings complexity to a participants’ reflections and feeling about their artistic identity and creative career trajectory. The examples demonstrate how art provides access to thoughts and feelings about difficult or emotional topics—art is a way of thinking about and reflecting on creative identity and experience.

While the art that features in the interview data is representative of the contemporary field (T. Smith, 2019), my approach positions art history in its big tent contemporary version that includes attention to the gamut of material and visual culture (Cherry, 2005), with flexibility and applicability to a wide range of cultural objects. Art history as a discipline is very good at recognizing the multifaceted nature of aesthetic experience (as both collective and individual) and paying in-depth attention to the work of art, something that is to the benefit of the sociology of art. There are many methods of art historical and visual analysis (Rose, 2012), with considerable diversity in how researchers frame the object and focus of analysis. In this case, I have reviewed staple documents of art historical analysis—art criticism, catalog essays, and artist statements—to establish key material and formal details as well as widely circulating interpretations of the artwork.

While both the sociology of art and art history involve interpreting the meaning of cultural objects, they most often diverge significantly in terms of how encoded meaning is determined, analyzed, and connected to wider societal structures and arrangements. Here I provide an example of a hybrid approach where research on the work of art and its interpretation can be incorporated alongside thematic analysis of interviews. Looking at both objects and interviews as rich data sources, this approach recognizes the importance of objectified cultural meaning and connects this to participants’ frames of reference and to other interview themes. This is one way, I argue, to counter the tendency in sociology toward an “empirically vigorous, yet aesthetically lifeless, sociology of the arts” (Eyerman & McCormick, 2006, p. 11).

Example 1: Institutions, Critique, and Recognition

The first example centers on works from feminist art history. They were discussed by women artists and faculty members at the art school who each described during their interviews how gender norms and artistic stereotypes impacted their careers and fuelled their creative interests in critique and progressive change through artistic practices.

The first reference is to a series of works under the label of Maintenance Art by American conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Widely regarded as a pioneering performance artist, Ukeles’s body of work foreshadowed discussions of care, work, and recognition that have only more recently entered into public discourse (Finkelpearl et al., 2016). In this case, Teresa hesitated during our interview when she described how to separate all the types of work required to maintain a viable artistic practice. She identified how, as a woman artist, it was harder to separate some of her creative labor from other types of paid and unpaid work—to have a career as an artist meant having an expansive view of creative work and everyday work both at the art school and at home. It was easier to imagine housework and care work, for example, as “another type of service work that is also . . . not that different from service work here [at the school].” With service work in all its gradations at the top of her mind, she turned to Ukeles’ work, making a visual reference to some of the most widely reproduced photographs of her performances, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973), where she is scrubbing the floor of the museum, “I see myself washing the floors of the school.” Ukeles’ intervention is an example of the invisible labor of care maintenance required to uphold public spaces and institutions. As performance studies scholar Shannon Jackson (2011) explains of Ukeles’ interests, “her work is not only about engagement with materials, or engagement with people but about engagement with bureaucracies” (p. 78). In this case, maintenance art becomes an apt description for the sort of care and maintenance Teresa felt compelled to do within the institution; especially, as she continued to discuss, where she felt too often women faculty were doing “more than enough” of the unglamorous day-to-day administrative tasks, which only served to make her feel like and appear like “less of an artist” in the school, because these arrangements left less time for her own art. But this is where Ukeles’ work also offered a solution to the dilemmas: the service must, “somehow become the art.” As Ukeles explains in her 1969 manifesto:

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. (Ukeles, 1969, np)

This sort of creative strategy was something Teresa was thinking about conceptually within her own delicate balance of work/life/art. The idea of the manifesto was an inroad for her to address the hesitancy she felt about speaking up about how service labor is gendered and inequitably distributed within her department: “I, like, don’t know what I can really say.” She feared informal penalties or damaging the hard-fought collegiality of the department. In this case, Teresa used art in her interview to emphasize care and service as both an artistic, labor, and social issue, but one that remains harder to discuss as a practical problem within the workplace. Art, thus, could be a possible remedy by making such connections front and center and in a way that does, at least symbolically, represent Teresa’s service labor.

The next example is also part of the feminist art canon and refers to not just one work but an artists’ collective and their varied artistic actions—the long-standing (since 1985) activist art collective with changing, anonymous membership, the Guerrilla Girls. In this example, Aisha expressed considerable frustration around learning the rules of what can and cannot be said about the administration and organization of the art school. She was genuinely not sure about the formal and informal rules of critique in her department and Faculty. The messages were really mixed. On the one hand, because it was an art school, people were generally quite open to different ideas and perspectives: “what you do and how you do it can be . . . your own thing. You can have big ideas and opinions.” On the other hand, “there really are things you shouldn’t say or do . . . like around art things or how things are[here].” Aisha was making sense of how to balance her critical artistic practice and commitments to social justice with the “pretty neutral, somehow” position about societal issues across much of the school. Aisha explained that as a racialized woman artist, she also felt especially uncertain about how her art and interests were regarded by her peers; there were some interactions with colleagues where they seemed quick to dismiss what she was doing as “on the same level.” Here, she expressed a desire for more anonymity and the ability to create and critique more freely: “I, ah, want a gorilla mask sometimes. I could use it for classes, a meeting? It would be a way to protest so much of this stuff, but I couldn’t be blamed later, yeah?” The reference to a gorilla mask is not random but is linked to the Guerrilla Girls’ iconic tactic of showing up in gorilla masks at targeted art events to protest the art world’s gender and racial inequalities. These actions sit alongside their media works that share research and statistics about the underrepresentation of women artists and BIPOC artists in art institutions and galleries. The Guerrilla Girls, to avoid art world scrutiny and penalty for its critiques, have developed a forceful but anonymous collective voice (Guerrilla Girls, 2020; McCartney, 2018, pp. 115–152).

Aisha used the example of the gorilla mask to capture her longing to speak without fear of institutional repercussions, especially around issues of equity and belonging. She continued to explain how her own work was deeply influenced by artist collectives that direct art toward life and social concerns (she named the Guerrilla Girls here specifically), and lamented there seemed to be this disconnect between the collectivity that is celebrated in artistic practices and the absence of collective orientation and action at work. Aisha was drawing on the Guerrilla Girls as a model for creative action and critique, looking for ways to incorporate this into her own work life. But it wasn’t just that they were critical, it was also that they were inside art institutions too. This is where the example is especially appropriate for Aisha’s situation: they offered a model for how to critique and still be inside the art world. As the Guerrilla Girls sum up in an interview, “What do you do when the art world you’ve spent your whole life attacking suddenly embraces you? Well, you don’t waste time wondering if you’ve lost your edge. You take your critique right inside the joint” (Bollen, 2012, n.p.). Members have always been practicing artists or related art professionals, and the group itself is well established in the contemporary art history canon. They regularly work with art institutions and have faced scrutiny in art scholarship and criticism about how effective their strategies have been in supporting diversity, equity, and belonging in the arts (Leng, 2020). As former member Gertrude Stein (2011, p. 89) wrote of the struggles and split within the group, “the contributions of nearly one hundred women who changed art history through their collective work, is an example of contention and regrouping that is pertinent to the renewed action and debate around collective artistic production and participatory practice.” Thus, they capture a complexity around the possibilities of critique that Aisha was also referencing as appropriate to her own circumstances. This example stuck with Aisha because, as she discussed throughout the interview, the status of critique within the art school was a recurring, complicated issue she felt both in her work life and her practice.

In these two examples, participants drew on art examples to help discuss and represent issues around equity and belonging that had impacted their career, but that at times were harder to capture or explain directly in the interviews; for many reasons, participants might resist diving into direct examples of gender or racial discrimination during interviews about their work and careers (Henry et al., 2017). There is considerable nuance within both accounts, and art is a way to conceptualize some of the ambivalence Teresa and Aisha felt as artists and instructors in an art school. There is an irresolvable character to the wider questions they are struggling with about artistic practice, critique, and community within the art school, and these tensions are represented within the projects themselves; art is well equipped to conceptualize but not resolve the central tensions.

Example 2: I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art

Niall was recently promoted to associate professor in the Faculty of Art. He was pleased by the way his career was taking shape and his promotion felt like a tangible achievement, but he was still struggling with how his sort of interdisciplinary community-based art practices fit within the school’s programs. American conceptual artist John Baldessari’s I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971 came up initially when Niall was discussing his hesitations over the tenure and promotion process: “can boring art bar you from promotion? What’s the difference between this assessment and that[one]?” A rhetorical question, but the long pause after it made clear that Niall had many questions about the evaluation of art within the tenure and promotion process. In the context of the discussion, his emphasis was not that boring should be a point of evaluation; rather, the evaluation process itself is often questionable and aesthetically insensitive. Meaning, the emphasis on judging everyone’s practice is the real monotony to be concerned about. This artwork’s provocation of boring unfolded into a wider discussion of the distinctiveness of the independent art school and how the wider system of higher education seems poorly equipped to recognize the hybrid art/education context (Buckley & Conomos, 2009; Madoff, 2009). This tenure process that didn’t really “see your art” was just one component of a broader concern around the uncertainty of artistic value and the nature of creative expertise and aesthetic content.

Baldessari’s work is a lithography based on a performance that was held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in 1971 as part of the school’s now legendary projects studio art class that invited guest artists from across North America to teach classes (Kennedy, 2012, p. 96). He was not able to attend in person but sent instructions to students to write this phrase floor to ceiling on the gallery wall, where it was written over 4,000 times. Standard descriptions of the work locate it as a cutting critique of art higher education, “By enlisting the art students to slavishly write the phrase over and over, Baldessari poked fun at the entire system of art education, which he felt encouraged students to imitate rather than experiment and innovate” (Whitney Museum of American Art, n.d.). Yet the method—sending instructions for the performance—was innovative, with the tension between artistic creativity and tedium on full display (McDonough, 2017, p. 14). The students had to engage in the very act they were asked to reject. Yet when Niall discussed this work, his interest was in faculty not students—the promotion and annual review processes encouraged faculty to imitate rather than experiment. He was concerned about the mismatch between artistic practices and conventional academic evaluation procedures that seemed to push toward conformity and repetition: there was too much interest in setting out criteria and not enough attention to the artworks themselves. “But what is boring?” I probed. Niall identified it as something to be feared in the critical reception of an artist’s work (“it’s the worst”), and something that should be the antithesis of the art school’s mission because “it’s all we have comparatively.” The school’s capacity to experiment, reinvent, and critique is what should, by Niall’s assessment, set it apart. But “boring” was also, he continued to explain, something that was hard to avoid given the implementation of so many formal evaluation procedures, which brings us back to the irony of Baldessari’s piece.

While uncertainty around quality and value always shadow artistic careers and production (Gerber, 2017), artistic excellence within academic institutions is especially hard to characterize because it is defined by a wide array of sites and actors within and outside of academia (Fine, 2018). For teaching artists, the university’s mix of autonomy and bureaucracy acutely dramatizes this critical impasse. But what does this artwork contribute to Niall’s discussion? The double bind is written into the artistic project itself: repetitive, tedious lines of text asking you to avoid the very thing you are physically doing (making boring art). This work is an appropriate parallel for the complications of evaluation for artists in academic institutions. The project is a way to be critical of art criticism, evaluation culture, and so-called “boring art” but not without the dilemmas of critique in tow: the art project definitively shares something with its object of critique; this, as Boltanski and Chiapello (2007, p. 40) explain, is a predicament for any critical project. The designation of boring becomes a category of evaluation, nonetheless. Niall aptly uses this project to help describe tensions between artists and institutions and his own struggle navigating often unclear expectations and evaluation processes. Identifying artistic themes and how they are conceptualized within an artwork is a way to unpack symbolic reference points within the interview relevant to the participant’s concerns about the institutionalization of creative practices in higher education and the uncertainties this invites.

Example 3: Aging, Identity, and Artistic Practice

During our interview, Alejandro spoke at length about an art project by a graduate student. He argued that this project was realizing, subtly and without rhetoric in tow, the sort of art–science collaborations that the institution was so keen to champion as a model: “This is the sort of project that I think of when we talk ‘artistic research.’ It is bending, blending, and doing differently inquiry . . . Before it might not have been welcome . . . now it is possible.” Alejandro described the project as an investigation of infertility, including topics such as the science of reproduction, health, the cultural resonance of the term, and the personal consequences for individuals and families. It was a “mixed method research project, storytelling, immersive experience.” Within the context of the interview dynamic, he was provided a careful description of this project and discussed the wide-ranging meanings of infertility because it had moved him as a work of art. This artwork was not by a well-known artist but an artist-in-training, yet student achievement was not the focus of the conversation. Instead, within his account, the project’s attention to “loss, ageing, feelings of failure” were front and center. This was the affective content of the discussion, and this artwork was a way to root our wider conversation about the uncertain trajectories of artistic creative careers. This was the central theme of this interview, so an artwork dedicated to the theme of infertility became a way to capture some of the uneasiness Alejandro conveyed about aging as an artist during the interview.

Alejandro was a late-career artist, someone who had been working at the art school for many decades. After discussing this artwork, he moved to talk about time in the institution, retirement, and the uncertain prospects that accompany a long career as an artist, even for someone like himself who had enjoyed considerable employment security. Thus, the above conversation around infertility and its cultural interpretation started to intersect later in the interview when he spoke of aging and fear of failure—namely, artistic failure and the mutable value of an artistic career. Artists are often applauded for their fertile imaginations and abundant artistic reproduction; these are central to some of the animating myths about artists in Western society (Pope, 2005). Artistic infertility—the failure to produce art or the “right sort of art” as he put it—is a professional hazard. Alejandro talked openly about his mixed feelings around aging and retirement as an artist; he was keenly aware of his status as “among the longest standing faculty members” and how this raised questions about “what’s enough . . . legacy and contributions.”

To be clear, time within the art school can have a curious way of diminishing your value–artistic currency thrives on contemporaneity—and this point was not lost on Alejandro as he discussed his career. On the one hand, he recognized his success as an artist; he was still an active artist and he never had to abandon his conceptual or activist interests. By his assessment,

when you see the long game, many things that seem impossible in the moment in terms of work and things the school needs and wants and just can’t have or do, are just little blips . . . not the make or break that you fear.

Overall, he firmly thought that the benefits of secure employment far outweighed the challenges in terms of his ability to maintain and nurture his artistic career. On the other hand, “I don’t think you ever have, er, the career you think your will” and this was how he characterized his own experiences. He made clear that he wasn’t “complaining” but he still felt there was a mismatch between his artistic contributions and career length versus its recognition. He had thought by this point, in “my late career stage, some things, ah, more shows or different types of acknowledgment” would have materialized more easily. While research has demonstrated many benefits of aging to artists’ creativity (Lindauer et al., 1997), this does not necessarily translate into professional recognition or institutional validation. Cultural industries often rely on narratives that link creative vision to youth, and they can be inhospitable to aging workers in various ways (Raisborough et al., 2022). Within art schools specifically, these shape expectations and responses to older artists’ practices (Adler, 1979; Painter, 2018). He had managed to accomplish the sorts of things required to have a successful career, which was “harder than it seems” but still worried, “what is enough?” So, even at this career stage, Alejandro was grappling with his anxiety around doing enough, being enough of an artist, and defining achievement in his late career. The discussion of the initial art project helped him capture some of his mixed emotions about aging and artistic (un)productivity, which were difficult to state directly within the interview.

This example is different from the first two because it was not part of an existing art historical narrative with substantial specialized and public discourse, but this did not diminish its significance to Alejandro. Instead, the discussion of the project was more detailed and he was careful to explain key aspects because the cultural shorthand did not already exist. In this case, looking at the artistic themes of the project (infertility, aging, failure, and loss) connected the content of the artwork to the content of the interview, where these themes surfaced in Alejandro’s discussion of his own experience as an artist. This approach allowed for more attention to aesthetic experience in artistic careers as a theme overall—something that is often minimized in accounts of creative professions that attend to social and organizational dynamics. By giving the artwork a voice within the analysis of the interview, in this example, I was better able to represent his mixed feelings about his career as an artist and illustrate how art was a way to make sense of some of his conflicted emotions.

Conclusion

In this article, I have developed an approach—what I have termed a “sociology of art (history) methodology”—that allows the artwork to enter the interview data and contribute to thematic meaning. By incorporating details about artworks discussed by participants into the interview analysis, the role of artworks as mediators of identity, emotions, and experience is clearer. There is a dialogue that takes shape between artwork and the interview, where art is a way of thinking and feeling that contributes to the interview. Art acts a as conceptual marker for how these artists interpret their own place as artistic workers in the art school, but it is not just that participants used art to access complex feelings and experiences about their work; rather, the art augments this complexity. In all examples discussed, the artworks underscored a tension within creative work that is not easily resolved.

By connecting details about artworks to the wider interview conversation, I have illustrated a way to map out the strain between creative professional identity and institutional organization; each case underscored a dilemma that the artworks captured more readily than mere description by the participant: the artwork brings in aesthetics and affect to capture deeply felt ambivalence. For example, Yan struggled with the meaning and value of artistic labor—he was critical of the ideals and expectations placed on artists as workers. Niall had mixed emotions about the heightened emphasis on measuring and judging artistic output at the schools but recognized there is an innate contradiction between creative experimentation and art education. Teresa and Aisha used artistic models to explain how their artistic identities are under greater scrutiny when racial and gender inequities combine within creative professions, but confronting these experiences within their own schools was challenging and raised even more questions about the status and risk of critique. Alejandro navigated heightened professional uncertainty as cultural ideas of youth and creative vitality sat alongside his long-standing career of service and creative dedication. Together, these examples not only align with other scholarship on the methodological challenge of art’s conceptual (Wohl, 2022) and objectified meanings (McDonnell, 2023) but they also illustrate how art can help to disrupt the tendency of interview analysis to create tidy stories and interpretive coherence (Bøe et al., 2023).

Despite the emphasis on visual art in this article, this methodology is relevant to other cultural objects identified by participants as especially meaningful during interviews. It is easy for researchers to dismiss such cultural references as extraneous to their interests and research. The approach I have modeled is a way to better recognize the process of meaning-making between cultural objects, discourses, and individuals, even though the content of the interviews did not provide a detailed picture of each participant’s individual interpretation of the object (which may or may not align with those of public culture). One of the key interpretive challenges and pleasures of qualitative research hinges on questions of representation and meaning; this article offers one more strategy for accessing the symbolic layers of an interview.