RK: I think a lot of first generation feminists are deeply disturbed that while they had certain skills and commitments to literary texts, they realize that their students and certainly the students of their students don't have the same knowledge or skills. And then these feminists are wondering what the point of the critique is anymore. So, this unease that I'm expressing is not unique to me or to a few people; I think it's fairly wide spread.

SR: I would contend that feeling is shared by students, too.

RK: I think that students are particularly bored by the "paranoid scenarios." I suppose Harvard students are really voracious for learning and the problem with "paranoid scenarios" is that once you've said it, it's very hard to develop very much. It just gets repetitive. I mean once you expose patriarchy then what? Any way, I know this is all very shocking stuff, but...

SR: Actually I don't think that it is very shocking, because the comment you just made about first generation feminists worrying that their students wouldn't have the tools or the commitment, but a feminist scenario, comes across a lot in your work. In terms of feminism, I'm thinking of your book on the photographer Cindy Sherman, because you not only identify the feminist scenario, what is being signified, but you ask how it's being signified...

RK: Well that's what I mean by a skill.

SR: Right, for me it seems extremely important that as students we learn to take that kind of skill and apply it to unpacking images and objects as opposed to just throwing a theory or scenario onto them. There's something about working not necessarily just from the inside out, but at least establishing a dialogue in both directions.

RK: Well, that's exactly what I mean.

SR: Thinking back to your comments on Pollock as a historically benighted subject, I'm interested to know about your new work on Picasso. In your essay "In the Name of Picasso," you're obviously very concerned with that overly biographical, benighted subject approach.

RK: Yes, Picasso is obviously the focus of an incredible biography industry. Picasso as a subject seems never to end as a fascination maybe not for your generation, but for an older generation. And what's interesting to me is that this Picasso, who after all did do something pretty great--cubism--immediately afterward begins to do something which many people would normally feel is not really great: namely a whole career as a pasticheur. So after cubism he becomes this super imitator of Ingres, Corot, Renoir, Poussin.

Of course then there's a kind of irony that he's the center of this biographical fascination, and yet he is working at leeching away the substance of a unified subject. So, for me Picasso poses the interesting art historical problem of what counts as an explanation, I've come up with an explanation I would call symptomatic, which has more to do with the structure of what happened. A symptom is about a kind of conversion of something that's internal which then interacts with something external to coalesce in a certain kind of formation.

SR: Talking about this reminds me of last summer's "Picasso and Portraiture" show at MoMA, which was organized around Picasso's biography and almost completely ignored the issue of style. Although this approach seems out of place in the contemporary critical climate, I wonder if it develops from a real practical need for a narrative structure, similar to an undergraduate's desire for a chronological art history survey. Maybe the public coming to MoMA would find this narrative easier to deal with than a show that grappled with a more complex issue like style. Do you think that this kind of biographical approach could be in any way productive?

RK: I have found the Picasso biography industry incredibly damaging, because it diverts one's attention from much more important issues. And pastiche seems to me to be one, especially when dealing with the role of pastiche in postmodernism and our contemporary experience of culture. Given that, to ignore the issue of pastiche or to write it off and say the great master can take whatever he wants and use it as grist for his mill simply ignores a real and pressing problem.

SR: The issue of Picasso's stylistic appropriation and contemporary post modernism seems especially appropriate to your work, given your past writing and October's theorizing of post modernism and visual practice in the eighties. I'm interested to know, however, if you still see a place for critical writing on really contemporary art in October.

RK: For October to deal with contemporary visual practice, we need young writers. The time when October was most plugged into contemporary visual practice was during the early eighties. In a sense you could say that there was a certain generation of critic connecting with a certain generation of contemporary practice.

Believe me, I don't know what the issues are. I mean I known what the issues are for me, and I think I have something to say about issues of contemporary culture, but an emerging generation of artists needs its own generation of critics. One of the functions of the magazine then is to make a context for that new generation of writers.

SR: By saying that a new generation of artists will need a new generation of critics, do you think that in any way undermines the art historical method that you and people like Yve-Alian Bois have pioneered? To me, you way of working is so useful in the sense that it is about really analyzing an object and applying very precise visual tools to unpack it and discover how it signifies. And in that sense, this methodology would seem somehow completely impervious to generational differences.