The decisive inflection in the formation of this type of society happens towards the end of the 60s, during the early explorations of post-Fordist modes of working. Performance in its classic inspiration is an early expression of these initially imperceptible movements. The work of artists associated with "relational aesthetics" at the beginning of the 90s is another one. In many ways, the art of the last quarter century finds ways of bringing "life as it is" on stage. This concern seems to be inseparable from the fact that "life as it is" is always already mediated by the space of information, itself technologically structured. A particular movement is created here. My book would hope to offer some theoretical schemes that might prove useful in analyzing it.

Santiago García Navarro: What rules have changed for the artist in the post-Fordist era? What is it that is implied by that present day tendency --above all in the most internationalized areas of the art circuit-- to work for museum appointed commissions, real-estate development, advertisement or other institutions of the cultural industry or of business in general?

RL: The negotiations that artists find themselves forced into these days are, particularly complex. I am not sure that the modernist artist was more independent than the contemporary one is, if by this we mean that he was more able to make his own decisions. It is true that his main practice was to produce objects that later circulated in the markets, rather that presenting projects to galleries, museums, foundations etc. The artist's profession has always been unlike any other. The artist is a professional who refuses to be part of a profession, as Pierre Bourdieu so well stated in The Rules of Art. This indeterminancy holds today. The vast majority of artists, of course, think of themselves as producers of objects destined for circulation in the markets, but a great number do not. Many from the latter group, on the other hand, work in a world of foundations, government offices, or work with biennial directors who favor a certain kind of project. Hence, of course, the gestation of a particular kind of virtuosity which, at times is simply that of someone who knows how to discover what these institutions and individuals want. Many artists though are attempting to manage a more complex balance. An ethnography of this type of social formation has not yet been made that I know of; but, if it were made, we would discover some interesting phenomena.

SGN: Could you explain a bit more how this undefined position of the artist as a professional or not a professional is maintained today? How does this fit at the heart of an era in which the cultural industry has reached its ultimate extension?

RL: When I say that the artist's profession has been advanced for a long time as a non-profession I am referring to the following: the artist, for several decades now, has defined himself less by a specific kind of knowledge, by the possession of a set of technical know-hows, than by the way in which s/he approaches the world, a way of being, even. Marcel Duchamp already defined what is essential concerning this stance according to which the artist is the one who exerts his action by withdrawing from the field of technical know-how.

If I believe that there is an ongoing change it is because lately, in some places (in the case of a project such as Park Fiction, let us say, where the artists present themselves as those who possess, on the contrary, a series of specific abilities that can be mobilized in the course of a collaboration), what is being advanced, if I am not mistaken, is a critical reevaluation of this position that look nothing like a return to the past.