Claire Bishop

EO

In Artificial Hells, particularly in chapter 9, you cite Bill Readings’ argument that the university once centered cultural values—but under globalization, its guiding principle shifted to abstract “excellence,” and after 2008, to market success. That framework really stuck with me. It feels just as relevant to art institutions, where financial viability increasingly overshadows critical or cultural inquiry.

What made you want to foreground this critique in the book? Was it shaped by your experience in academia, or by what you were seeing artists and institutions do at the time?

CB

It came from a real sense of disappointment and frustration with what was happening in British education at the time—because that’s where I did my PhD and held my first academic jobs. I felt those changes directly, especially at my last post in the UK, at Warwick University. Readings’ argument was made in relation to the US and cultural studies but it all felt very relevant to the neoliberalization of the UK higher education sector.

That whole chapter you’re referring to was the convergence of two things: artists becoming increasingly interested in pedagogy (which struck me as an important development of relational aesthetics) and my own experience of institutional change within the university. I was tracking that discourse—through Bill Readings’s writings in the ’90s, Mark Fisher in the 2000s—even if I don’t quote Fisher directly. I do think academic capitalism plays out very differently in the U.S., because the government doesn’t impose requirements on all universities (although, hey, that’s changing). The degree to which education is privatized here still feels shocking to me. And the structure of majors and minors is bewildering. In the UK, you study one subject, and that’s it. The focus is total.

EO

That, to me, just reads as academic capitalism. The sheer range of it.

CB

It’s like you pick from a buffet of courses and topics and construct your own path. And then you think about those big American campus universities—with all the emphasis on sports and entertainment facilities, and fancy accommodation. And high professorial wages! All of that is baked into why American education is so expensive. It was bracing to read a New York Times piece by Masha Gessen in April—they argued that universities need to return to what they’re actually about, which is teaching. Not all these add-on services that are more about lifestyle, networking, and elite branding.

EO

It’s funny that you make that distinction about the UK, because elsewhere you’ve said that education is increasingly treated as a financial investment rather than a creative space.

CB

It is—and it has been here for a long time.

EO

A career move, rather than a site of epistemological inquiry for its own sake.

CB

Exactly. But it has virtues too. And that’s why education is getting slammed by the Trump administration—because it’s one of the few spaces where you’re actually encouraged to question the knowledge you’ve grown up with. You learn to read critically, to analyze media and imagery, to challenge the world around you. Everything is open to interrogation. And that’s being reframed as “woke leftist indoctrination.” But it’s not—it’s about holding space for doubt, for inquiry, for questioning and exchange. The people attacking university education clearly haven’t spent time in a seminar.

EO

What made you decide to bring together art and pedagogy in Artificial Hells?

CB

I was seeing artists doing it. Do you remember the fuss around that canceled Manifesta? For a moment in the early 2000s, Manifesta felt like a significant platform—maybe not quite Documenta or Skulptur Projekte Münster, but part of that new European optimism. In 2006, there was going to be a Manifesta in Nicosia that transformed the biennial into an art school. It got cancelled—I can’t even remember why—but it sparked a lot of discourse and spin-off projects. Anton Vidokle launched United Nations Plaza, and Münster in 2007 had a few pedagogic projects. Meanwhile Tania Bruguera had already started her Arte de Conducta school in Cuba. There was a noticeable pedagogical turn. That felt, to me, like an important and welcome development of the kind of empty conviviality I associated with relational aesthetics.

EO

Even with research-based artists—what good does any of this do now, in terms of the experiential aspect?

CB

I wouldn’t write it all off. When you look at research-based art, a lot of those artists are incredibly smart, generous thinkers—and often great teachers, even if the work itself isn’t always that dynamic. So it definitely has a place. Honestly, a lot of my own knowledge about obscure or marginalized subjects comes from engaging with that kind of art—not from reading academic texts. It’s made certain histories present for me in ways I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

EO

How do your personal stakes in these subjects surface in your work—particularly as someone engaged in both teaching and publishing within academic contexts?

CB

Well, I’m a teacher. And that made the chapter on pedagogy hard to write at times—I was very fixed in my thinking. I was approaching things from within a university framework, and it took a while to realize: artists are doing this differently and I don’t need to impose the same criteria. There’s space for elasticity. As for publishing in academic contexts: none of my books are with a university press. I’ve only published two things in October—one was the relational aesthetics article in 2004, and the other was the delegated performance chapter from Artificial Hells, which apparently the editorial board was pretty divided on. I have to say, I don’t really enjoy publishing in academic journals. The work tends to just sink without a trace. For me, it was always about reach—about connecting with a much broader audience. This is why I went all in on Artforum.

EO

When you first addressed relational aesthetics, the tone was urgent and rigorous. Looking back, what feels different—or the same—about the conversation now?

CB

The essay on relational aesthetics follows a pattern that steers all my work. I see something going on in galleries and exhibitions, and nobody is questioning it, so I step in. As for where are we now—it was wild seeing the Rirkrit show at PS1 last year—the frenzy around free coffee and noodles, mostly from people who weren’t even born when he was first doing that in the ’90s. It really did my head in. You realize how much a generation’s reception is colored by context. All that documentation from the ’90s now looks retro, rather than entrepreneurial swaggering. If the audience has been through art school, they might have a framework for grasping the work. But if not, they’re just reacting as a general audience—and that reaction hasn’t changed much in thirty years. It’s still basically a naïve delight in the freebie. Except now, everyone’s taking photos of it as they go.

EO

How did that essay shape the way you approached your later work?

CB

I don’t know. It’s hard to gauge the impact of an essay. I tend to think in terms of the initial conversation it sparks—maybe a bit of pushback, someone writing a letter of complaint. But after that, I’m already onto the next thing. I don’t look back. I look forward.

EO

You’re not American, yet you’ve been teaching in the U.S. for years. What differences have you noticed? What was at stake when you first arrived—and what’s at stake now?

CB

Thanks to the new administration, there’s more at stake now than ever. Inside and outside the seminar room, I see my role as cultivating a generous, mutually constructive atmosphere for learning. God that sounds wishy washy! But it’s not just about subject matter—it’s about helping students learn how to speak to each other, how to give feedback that’s thoughtful, clear, and will actually be heard. It’s about becoming better listeners and interlocutors. I think that’s something my colleagues here share—and it’s one reason the environment feels so different from a lot of Ivy League schools (or so I’ve been told). Mentorship is part of my pedagogy. Spending time with students, giving feedback on their writing, being present and supportive. Honestly, it took becoming a parent and living through the pandemic to recognize how much more generous I needed to be. Just because I’d been able to motor along independently for years didn’t mean that others could do that too. Everyone is carrying different responsibilities. So understanding that—and adjusting my availability, my expectations, my support—that’s also been pedagogic growth.

EO

What are the conditions that produced you?

CB

That’s probably nothing to do with books. That’s all totally personal stuff. Nobody ever asks me about that—partly because I deflect it. But really, most of the time, people just don’t ask.

EO

Still, there was a context that produced the scholarship—a kind of showing your work, as a professor. That feels different from being an artist, where there’s always an element of performativity. Take Rirkrit’s 1992 show at 303 Gallery, for instance—what was it like to experience it then, compared with revisiting it at MoMA PS1 in 2023?

CB

My encounter with Rirkrit’s work was always belated anyway. I was doing my undergraduate degree when he was starting to show in Europe and never saw it. So my access to his work came through Relational Aesthetics and a sheer irritation with Nicolas Bourriaud’s writing and breezy confidence. At the time, I was teaching in the MA Curating Contemporary Art program at the Royal College of Art, and we had endless curators coming through. There was very little written on exhibition history back then, so most of the classes took the form of oral histories—conversations, visiting lectures, curators talking about their own shows. The person who ran the MA program was very good at catching people passing through London and pulling them in to teach. I’d sit in on those sessions.

That early 2000s moment was really the rise of the superstar curator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hou Hanru, mostly male curators, but there were also figures like Maria Lind on the rise. Francesco Bonami’s Venice in 2003 nailed that moment, exhibiting curatorial styles.

EO

That hadn’t really manifested in the U.S. yet?

CB

There was the curatorial studies program at Bard, upstate, but I don’t know what their program involved. I don’t think they had the fast-and-casual approach to kidnapping visiting lecturers that we had at the RCA. There were a few other programs too—de Appel in Amsterdam, Konstfack in Sweden, one in Grenoble. But we were the only one based in a big city, where you had constant traffic: people coming through, conversations happening. Especially after 2000—Tate Modern had just opened, the Frieze Art Fair had just launched. Suddenly, London was internationalized in a way it had never been before. 2000 was a real break. Just last weekend was the 25th anniversary of Tate opening, so it’s been on my mind again.

It’s hard to overstate how much shifted then—moving from a provincialized YBA situation in the ’90s to something much more international, sophisticated, discursive, outward-looking, even with ambitions to be global. With all these curators coming through, it became interesting to track them: who’s making sense? Who has a meaningful critique? Vasif Kortun was another important voice. Viktor Misiano and Gerardo Mosquera, and of course Okwui Enwezor. There were a lot of postcolonial perspectives—really powerful ones. And then there were others, like Nicolas, who made sweeping theoretical claims, but in a way, I didn’t hear as substantiated. It often felt like he was upholding a boys’ network—artists who were cocky, confident, and never criticized at all.

EO

They themselves or the actual work?

CB

The work. Nobody criticized the work. But your question makes me want to comment on this tight link between artist and output that we experience today, which is really an effect of social media. Before the 2010s, you might read the occasional magazine feature—Bomb and Flash Art being rare exceptions—but the artist’s voice wasn’t centered. Now we have endless interviews, and through Instagram, artists act as their own publishers. Their accounts serve as exhibition archives, statements of position, and social maps: who they’re with, what shows they’re in, who’s commenting, what causes they’re engaging with. It creates a curated window onto the individual—not the whole person, of course, but a PR version. It allows the public to know where artists stand on Israel, Black Lives Matter, abortion, or any number of issues that used to be kept deliberately ambiguous. If you go further back, that ambiguity was the norm, and even an asset. Many of the Abstract Expressionists were communists or anarchists—but you’d never know this from the work. Ad Reinhardt published political cartoons under a pseudonym. There was a firewall between the artist’s personal life and their artwork.

Even when I graduated in ’94 and moved to London, nobody wanted to declare anything about their work. Most women artists would completely avoid saying anything about feminism, even though the art world was completely misogynist. If people were reading theory, they didn’t talk about it and just wanted to get drunk. I was very academic, very in my head—and the YBA art world hit me like a truck. I remember thinking, “What is this anti-intellectualism? This machismo?”

EO

Like sexy? Or do you mean like a kind of macho bravado?

CB

No, no, no. It struck me as crazy ugly. Crazy ugly and de-skilled and fuck you in a really stupid way. I hated it. But that was the art world that I was birthed into. For sure, it was better than what came before, which was sculptors of the Lisson Gallery in the ’80s—all suave guys, all rather upper-middle-class, some of whom were even born in what were then the colonies. So I found myself caught between two classes: the posh men of the ’80s and the working class kids of the ’90s. In retrospect, I appreciate the class shift that happened with YBA, because that’s the kind of background I came from as well. But it wasn’t one I was particularly comfortable with—because I’d just gotten an education at Cambridge University and did not fit in to the art world. For me it took some training to be learn how to function there, and this training largely took place through alcohol.

That’s probably the best way of describing the ’90s: I was given a set of art historical skills and then dumped into a—

EO

It was like, “Go to the club.” [Laughs.]

CB

Not exactly. More like, drink heavily and chat at the gallery. I can’t stress enough how important alcohol was to the functioning of the British art world, especially in the ’90s.

EO

What did the room feel like?

CB

It was about being able to banter, be funny, outrageous, talk to people. That was good social training for me because I was an introverted little nerd. It was also about learning how to speak to artists without dumping a load of theory or history on them. I can’t speak to it as a significant cultural moment, but when Saatchi had an opening, it was a real event. We’d never seen so much free champagne. Everyone was mingling—people running institutions, artists, and the liggers, as we called ourselves. We were just hanging on. Sneaking in under the wire, drinking as much as possible, laughing at the art. Freeloading, basically.

EO

How did you get the job at the Royal College of Art?

CB

I started writing for magazines while I was still finishing my PhD and the director of the MA Curating program read my pieces, contacted me and asked, “Would you be interested in a job? We need someone to supervise the MA theses.” I don’t think they talked to anyone else. I just landed the job, which was two days a week. My first assignment was, “Can you take this group of 13 students to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo for a week?” And I got paid for every day that I was there! I couldn’t believe it. This was unbelievable, after scraping by on a pittance for my entire adult life. And aside from the money: going to the other side of the world, going to the Global South, absolutely blew my mind. Every year after that, I was responsible for organizing a trip to take the students somewhere: we went to Beijing and Shanghai, Istanbul, Romania, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Rio. That was such an education. So even though I did an art history PhD at Essex, I probably learnt as much (if not more) from working in that curating department at the Royal College of Art.

EO

What was your reading on the Frieze Art Fair? How did that realization manifest within the context of everything becoming more global?

CB

Frieze was exciting. I’d never been to any other art fair, so I didn’t know that Frieze was different. But it was—especially in those early years—because of the kinds of gestures gallerists made. Instead of just presenting a representative sample, a group show, or a monographic approach to the booth, a small but significant handful made something performative out of their stands. For example, the galleries that represented Elmgreen and Dragset created a duplicate booth, so you had a moment of déjà vu as you walked past—“Wait, haven’t I already seen this?” It was also where Tino Sehgal was first given a platform in London. And the talks program back then was actually good—it was rare to have a discursive program anywhere, so it didn’t yet have the kind of empty, chat-show feel that fair talks often have now. It brought a lot of people to town, and a level of excitement we hadn’t experienced before. Tate Modern changed the game as well.

EO

How did that influx of curators and networking activity translate into your teaching at the Royal College of Art?

CB

It’s funny—at the time, we used to refer to those supercurators as “search engines”, because they were such gatekeepers of the knowledge. This was before everything was online and you could do your own research. Hans Ulrich Obrist was the epitome of a search engine, capable of answering queries like “I need an artist from X who deals with topic Y,” or, “Who’s doing interesting work in this country or city?” The level of name recall, of familiarity with practices, was enormous—especially compared to how localized things were before that.

EO

What did it actually feel like engaging with people like that?

CB

Obrist is a little robotic, so it was kind of bizarre to have him come and speak at the class (rather than with them). Once we had him teach on a phone speaker, which was even stranger—even more disembodied, and somehow even more fitting for that “search engine” quality he had. Other curators felt more like gatekeepers and arbiters of taste. That was back when the curator really seemed to approximate the DJ. You trusted their selection. If it was a certain curator, you knew the show would be conceptual, rigorous, interesting.

EO

What was taste’s place in all of this, in terms of how the network functioned?

CB

I don’t know if it still operates the same way. Like now, when you hear someone is curating a biennial, do you get excited? Do you think, “Oh, that’s going to be good, I should make an effort and get over there”? Or do you just think, “Yeah, yeah, more of the same”?

EO

One hundred percent the same.

CB

It’s going to be the same. Twenty years ago, you’d hear someone was curating a biennial and think, “Oh wow, this person is doing it—and they have a specialization in this area. It’s going to be inflected in an interesting way. I trust that they’ll put something together intelligently.” For example, I felt that way when Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche did Istanbul in 2005. You knew that you were going to get Vasif’s regional expertise and Charles’s lefty politics. And the result was fantastic, with a super creative use of the city and its spaces. But maybe I’m just older and jaded.

EO

You’re not. You’re just naming something that still feels true—the sameness, the predictability, the flatness of it all.

CB

Part of the problem is that there’s just so much of it. Biennials were genuinely exciting at one point—they’d been on the rise since the ’90s—but often in far-flung places I didn’t have access to, especially the big Asian ones like Guangzhou, Busan, and Taipei. They felt impossible to get to. But then there were more accessible ones like Istanbul, which were fantastic. Istanbul in the 2000s felt like Berlin a decade earlier—decrepit, falling apart, and changing fast. I know it sounds like I’m romanticizing, but they picked really good curators who put together strong shows.

EO

And in London, who was shaping the scene from the gallery side? Like, who was the gallerist everyone paid attention to—who set the tone?

CB

Probably Anthony d’Offay. My first art world job in London was soon after I moved there after my undergraduate degree in 1994. I worked two days a week for a woman who had been a director at d’Offay and was now doing freelance projects for YBA artists like Michael Landy. That’s where I encountered a lot of the work for the first time. She had a Damien Hirst medicine cabinet in the office. And a Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin mobile hanging in the living room—just scrappy little things from their shop that she’d bought to support them. I couldn’t believe how rough the aesthetic was. Now it all looks different, but at the time I just thought, “This stuff’s terrible.”

That was my d’Offay connection. From the way my boss treated me, I understood she’d been treated badly by him. Even the most mundane things were extreme—if I was throwing a piece of paper out, I couldn’t just put it in the bin. First, I had to fold it neatly in half to show that I had deliberately discarded it. So anal.

EO

What kept you going then?

CB

I was doing my PhD, and once a week, I’d head out to Essex University for classes. The rest of the time I was in the British Library. I’d be there from 10am when it opened to 5 or 5:30 when it closed. Then I’d go to a 6pm opening, drink, and hang out with people. It was also pre-cell phones, so I can’t even remember how we contacted each other. You just went to openings on the off chance. Maybe a friend would be there, maybe not. Nothing was guaranteed. You just had to go and start integrating.

EO

How did you then connect the dots as a writer? Did you?

CB

The only thing I thought was: I want to be in this in-between space between art history and art criticism. I was doing a PhD, I had started writing for magazines (Flash Art, Untitled, Make, and then the Evening Standard newspaper), but these were limiting. I wanted my criticism to be art-history informed—and my art history to be critically informed and grounded in value judgments. My model for that was Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss. Even though they’re not my models now, obviously, they were the reference then.

As an undergraduate, I was never taught contemporary art—not even 20th-century art. Anything I knew about recent art was self-taught. We could write a thesis at the end, and I had come across this artist—God knows how—called Cindy Sherman. I wanted to write about her. But none of the faculty had ever heard of this woman dressing up and taking photos. As I started researching—this was around ’93, ’94—I realized I’d landed right in the aftermath of the NEA controversies and it was exciting to encounter Mapplethorpe, Serrano, and the rest.

There was so much writing on Sherman that pulled in questions of postmodernism, censorship, identity, psychoanalysis, theory. I found it all incredibly compelling. But at the same time, I was resistant, because this was not my experience of the work. You don’t need all that to get something from the Untitled Film Stills and love them. So I wrote a very contrarian thesis about...I don’t even know what. I got a great grade (for which I am very grateful—it really set me up to get PhD funding), but I wouldn’t stand by it or recommend anyone to write that way. I feel like I was entirely self-taught. I received no pushback or engagement with my ideas. The only feedback I got was, “Cut down the repetitions.” Of course, I wasn’t engaging with the existing discourse properly because I didn’t understand it. I was just looking at the work and thinking, “These are fabulous. Can’t we just enjoy them as narratives?” Undergraduates today are leagues smarter.

EO

What specifically resonated with Krauss?

CB

That bolshie, strident voice. The kind of confidence you didn’t see in many women writers. The way she dealt with minimalism and post-minimalism, and her writing from the ’70s—I really liked that. In retrospect, it’s funny how I was so drawn to her confidence and absolute sense of being totally correct. In fact, she’s the opposite of Foster, who’s all tentative questions. I was doing my MA when his Return of the Real came out. I loved that book. I remember thinking, “wow—someone who takes contemporary art seriously, thinks it through from every angle, diagnoses it, names something, complicates it, asks questions.” I loved all that. It wasn’t until much later that I read T.J. Clark and other kinds of writing, which I actually prefer now.

EO

What about Craig Owens?

CB

I encountered him while I was writing on Cindy Sherman, but it wasn’t something I felt drawn to. I’d say it took a long time for any of the queer stuff to really land with me.

EO

It sounds like you were never going to be of your context.

CB

Maybe. One of the primary vectors of lived experience in Britain is class. Race and gender are always secondary—class is the foundational one. I came from an upper working-class/lower-middle-class family in the middle of nowhere. I went to Cambridge and felt totally out of place—four years of feeling like I wasn’t rich enough, posh enough, educated enough. Then I moved to London and suddenly I was over-educated. I couldn’t get even the crappest job in a gallery because I was “over-qualified.” I was surrounded by the YBAs—many of whom came from similar class backgrounds—but they weren’t intellectual at all. So I was caught in-between. At the Royal College, I was out of place in a different way, because I wasn’t a curator and was doing criticism and art history. It was good, though—I had great colleagues, some of whom I’m still close to.

It was a relief when all the smart Europeans came through town. To paraphrase Superflex, “Please don’t leave us here with the YBAs.” I’m generalizing, of course. There were good artists too—people I liked talking to, like Paul Noble. When I talk about a YBA attitude, I mostly mean the Jake and Dinos Chapman attitude. The Damien Hirst attitude.

EO

What was that attitude at that time?

CB

Oh, my God. Guys just throwing their dicks around. They were so dismissive of women.

EO

Tracy and Sarah?

CB

No, Tracy and Sarah were different. Tracy, I didn’t really intersect with much. Sarah was kind of quiet and more boyish—but it was also about drinking people under the table. Who’d be the first to fall on the floor? That was the vibe. Things started to shift for me when I met Jane and Louise Wilson in 1999. They were on the younger end of that YBA moment, twins, and just a little older than me. That was fun—and more female energy.

EO

What are the stakes when you’re thinking about class—when you’re born into a context of class politics—and then come to America?

CB

It felt so liberating. Of course, you learn to read class here too, but there’s definitely a honeymoon period when you think it’s wonderful and that nobody really cares about class. And then you start to feel it, and see how perniciously it intersects with race. In the UK, the art world was this strange space of incredible mobility. But as university education stops being free, artists start to come from more homogeneous backgrounds. We can already see that in the U.S.

EO

When you came here, what was your reading of feminists and women? Did that have a place in what you were focused on?

CB

I’m sad to say there’s hardly any feminism in my story, even though the transformational figures in my career were all women, from high school to university. I would say it took getting together with my partner Nikki to really raise my feminist consciousness in a way I hadn’t confronted before. Now I’m perpetually aware of it, especially working in an institution—being the woman in the room in certain meetings, watching the comfort that men have speaking and holding forth with their ideas, and noticing my own discomfort in speaking up. It’s gotten better the longer I’ve been here, but it wasn’t easy in the beginning. I feel that I’ve got to represent. I can’t get away with being the quiet one in the corner—I’ve got to say something. And then it’s the spiral: “Should I speak up, even if it sounds stupid? Or stay quiet and look passive?” All that crap.

Luckily, I’m in a female-majority department, so that never happens at the departmental level. It’s more at the institutional level where I feel that imbalance playing out.

EO

The art world was so different—and now it’s a different place. Based on the people who’ve continued to rise, what do you think happened? What changed to produce our current conditions?

CB

That’s a big one. Maybe I’d phrase it differently: there was such an obsession with curating in the 2000s. It was a way of making sense of globalization—it offered a kind of shortcut structure we all recognized. It felt manageable. Alongside that, there was so much discussion about the exhibition as medium, how you format it, how you play with it. It was important to do something differently, to stand out. Now, no one cares. Both discourses have fallen by the wayside and uniformity rules the day.

For example, a figure like Okwui Enwezor was so important for exhibitions and discourse. I don’t know who the equivalent is today. Documenta11 was groundbreaking: the global turn, the use of lens-based media, the idea of the platform—it wasn’t just aesthetic, it shaped the art discourse of that whole decade. It was intellectually invigorating and also had market effects (over time). You saw someone who put ideas and objects together with rigor. That still matters to me: the intelligence of arranging objects in space to produce meaning that’s greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t see that here a lot. In part because it takes time—and because you need to be free of those market imperatives (which are so dominant in U.S. museums) to be able to do something thoughtful.

EO

How is that manifesting in museums and how is that manifesting in galleries? Because galleries were also in a completely different echelon.

CB

I don’t know what to say about commercial galleries. I pay more attention to institutional exhibitions than to gallery shows. There’s more thought and research that goes into them, frankly. But I’m wary of the mega-galleries and the way in which they’re taking over publishing, gradually displacing the art magazines with their inflight magazine approach to criticism.

EO

What is your stance on the Ivy League and higher education, given that you are of it?

CB

Four years of my education were incredibly privileged at Cambridge—but was it privilege or luck? Lucky that I got in. Lucky that I was really at the tail end of free education—Thatcher had just cut the grants, but I didn’t have to go into massive debt to get through it. And luck that the feminist professor who interviewed me thought they should give a place to a girl of my class from a state school. So I was the recipient of what we would now call affirmative action. But with that comes a lot of imposter syndrome and feeling out of place.

Coming to the U.S. was an education in understanding cultural difference. I’m endlessly grateful that I’ve landed in this institution, which is a public university. I try and match this publicness in my research and by staging conferences and public events. In this, I feel very in tune with the institution as a whole and its emphasis on public knowledge. Just after writing Artificial Hells, I was made head of this department, and it felt like the book had become a kind of manual—eight years in the making—for navigating participation at a departmental level.

EO

What are you thinking about in terms of education now?

CB

It’s always about how to teach better. This is the Graduate Center, so I never have to teach undergraduates—only doctoral candidates—which means I have to push myself as far as I can. Every two years I teach a methods class, and each time I reinvent it. It’s partly a challenge I set for myself: to learn something new, to catch up on the reading I’ve been meaning to do, but also to rethink how we carve up this thing we call art history. That’s a constant process. Another challenge is to think about how to teach outside the classroom. In 2022, I reworked an MFA class into a doctoral seminar called Performing Research. We met in a different location around the city each week and built a pedagogical space from wherever we were. The sites were intentional—each one supported a different theme, and we always paired the space with a specific activity, guest speaker, or framing device. It was an attempt to rethink what and where a classroom is, and how we disseminate our research to the public. And (to come full circle to where we started), the example of artist-run schools was formative for this.