In practice, fortunately, the interviews still read as though in each instance the two principals are discovering the rules of each other’s games, or of some as-yet-imaginary game they might essay together. Of course, Obrist always knows the artist’s pitch in advance, but he constantly spots points on the boundary toward which they could move the action. This might entail noticing a book on a shelf behind the artist — as he does with Demand’s copy of a biography of urban planner Robert Moses — or (more often) alluding to a conversation with another artist so that a frayed sort of context emerges. (Obrist occasionally flags the interdisciplinarity of that context a little awkwardly, as when he responds to Demand’s mention of Nabokov by asking, "You mean the writer Nabokov?")

This dilation of the artist’s environment means that Obrist comes off as an extraordi-narily prolific name-dropper. His questions and interjections are filled with phrases such as "Richard Hamilton told me...," "As Pierre Boulez said to me...," and "When I inter-viewed Henri Cartier-Bresson...." But one has the sense that what’s being developed at such moments, quite despite appearances, is an expansively democratic sense of what conversations in the artworld might be — just conversations — and that they might potentially, and literally, given the range of Obrist’s subjects, include all of us. There is almost a paranoid impulse in Obrist’s interviewing everybody and then disseminating the results through further interviews, those in turn becoming the subjects of glancing asides in future dialogues. It is as if the artworld, and Obrist’s place in it, were merely a pretext for the ramification of a vast web of cultural, intellectual, and scientific connections.

This sense of a democracy of interlocutors in Obrist’s interviews, the suspicion that between and beneath these conversations others are going on even as he and his current interviewee speak, is partly a matter of the discursive form of the Q&A. In an interview with Paul Rabinow in 1984, Michel Foucault expressed an antipathy toward polemics, preferring instead the interview or dialogue. Questions and answers, he said, "depend on a game — a game that is at once pleasant and difficult — in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue." (The polemicist, on the other hand, "proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance.") Obrist’s interviews attempt to go further, to establish the rules for an infinite conversation and street plans for unrealizable routes. "The Conversation Series" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.