It has now been 40 years since Donald Judd published 'Specific Objects', an essay he characterised as simply a 'report on three-dimensional art', which included the famous sentence: 'A work needs only to be interesting.'¹

This syntactically challenged statement subsequently became the subject of a great deal of debate, starting, of course, with Michael Fried's equally famous - and apparently wilful - misreading of it in Art and Objecthood. Fried's interpretation suggests various ways of rewriting the sentence, including 'A work only needs to be interesting', or perhaps 'A work needs to be only [as in merely] interesting'. In either case, he makes the question of whether the work is interesting Judd's only criterion for judging it, levelling, in a word, the evaluative potential not only of the term itself, but of Judd's criticism altogether. Interest therefore took on what might appear to be undue significance for post-war criticism owing largely to the schism that resulted, at least in part, from the standoff between these writers on its account. Fried's construction of interest as the binary opposite of quality is now nothing short of doxa for any number of contemporary critics. As Hal Foster writes in The Return of the Real: '[T]he normative criterion of quality is displaced by the experimental value of interest, and art is seen to develop less by the refinement of the given forms of art (in which the pure is pursued, the extraneous expunged) than by the redefinition of such aesthetic categories.'² Now firmly established as the postmodernist successor to modernist quality, interest might have found a new address - in both senses of the term.

Writing about the 2004 Whitney Biennial in the May issue of Artforum, Scott Rothkopf observed that '[T]he Biennial overwhelms its audience with an expansive compendium of curiosities, enthusiasms and interests. The lion's share of work seems to announce for its makers, "I am interested in this" - with "this" preferably standing in for some slightly outré yet hip cultural signifier like Super Mario Bros. or a disco ballad your parents once knew.'³ Obviously, Rothkopf's use of the term differs markedly from Judd's application, as well as his interpreters'. In fact, one could reasonably argue that something (an artwork) being interesting is completely different from someone (an artist) being interested. This is certainly true, but whether an intentional nod to this hoary debate or not, it's not just Rothkopf's employment of the term but its displacement that I find significant. One reason for pursuing a comparison between these different moments of interest is my assumption that the interests that Rothkopf is referring to, however they're manifested in the work, are intended to render a work that is, ultimately, interesting in Judd's sense. Considering these two moments together might therefore shed some light on both the historical significance of this term and its present currency.

Fried's discussion of Judd's comment appears at the end of his essay in the third of three numbered 'propositions' or 'theses' that constitute his claim that 'theatre and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such.'⁴ As a direct response to Judd's advocacy of work that was 'neither painting nor sculpture', Fried's conclusion that 'what lies between the arts is theatre' was intended to dispatch with literalist art (as he called minimalism) once and for all. In fact, he read 'A work needs only to be interesting' as an acknowledgment of the 'problematic character' of literalist art, since it appeared to support his argument concerning the minimalists' ambivalence not only about questions of value or quality but, more fundamentally, about whether what they were making was art. According to Fried, 'all that matters [for Judd] is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain (his) interest', which he contrasts with the 'conviction' that modernist art stood to compel - that is, its capacity for comparison with past work within the same discipline 'whose quality is not in doubt'. Two of the central terms of Fried's critical lexicon - conviction and quality - didn't involve individual judgements of taste (that's what the parenthetical 'his' alluded to in his comment about what mattered to Judd) but judgements whose objectivity was guaranteed, at least in theory, by the observation of the boundaries between the arts, and comparisons based on the conventions proper to each individual art. The subtext here is the Kantian disinterestedness that informed formalist judgements as well as their presumptive universality, which is the issue raised by Fried's oblique reference to Judd's personal taste.⁵ As Kant wrote, '[T]he judgement of taste, accompanied with the consciousness of separation from all interest, must claim validity for every man.'⁶ Judd's criticism failed on both counts for Fried, whose reading implies that Judd's evaluations, lacking the rigor and consensus of formalist judgements, were more-or-less devoid of critical value (and were implicitly relegated to the status of opinion).

Although Fried clearly rejected the possibility that there might be a link between interest and value - 'the concepts of quality and value', he wrote, 'are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts' - James Meyer has traced Judd's use of the term to the pragmatist philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, a follower of William James, who was explicit about their conn-ection.⁷ 'That which is an object of interest,' wrote Perry, 'is eo ipso invested with value.'⁸ The flatness, even dullness of Judd's clipped prose and, even more importantly, his refusal to ascribe a utopian or transcendental aspiration to the objects he deemed interesting made his judgements appear too dispassionate to Fried - not to mention undiscerning. Understated as it was, however, Judd's criticism did not lack value judgements. As Jonathan Flatley writes, 'Judd did not want to obviate the question of value so much as redefine it in a way that seemed more relevant to the current situation.'⁹ Redefining value at that moment meant, amongst other things, that it applied to a broader range of work, which Judd appreciated for reasons that sometimes coincided with Fried's but more often did not since his judgements weren't constrained by the conventions and categories that Fried insisted on. Not only was interest itself an evaluative term for Judd but, as Fried acknowledged, it was also closely related to another of Judd's critical terms: 'specificity'. As Fried went on to argue, 'The interest of a given work resides, in Judd's view, both in its character as a whole and in the sheer specificity of the materials of which it is made'. Wholeness, or singleness, was Judd's watchword for non-relational composition, which was one way to avoid illusionism. Specificity was another, related, as it was, to the 'direct' use of materials: instead of using marble to denote skin or drapery, cold-rolled steel, for example, was used as such. (Of course, illusionism was also something modernist painting and sculpture had to avoid.)

Specificity, singleness, wholeness, directness – these were qualities the best new work shared, according to Judd, but they did not guarantee the work's quality as in Fried's use of the term.¹⁰ The real test was the work's capacity to produce a 'credible' experience. For example, in reviews of Lee Bontecou's and Ronald Bladen's reliefs written in 1963, Judd maintained that the strengths of Bontecou's works resided in their singleness, broad scale, total shape and the relationship of structure and image. He concluded that the work was 'credible and awesome'.¹¹ Bladen's work, however, which shared some of the same qualities - boldness and simplicity - was 'interesting' but, finally, 'not enough'.¹² The simple possession of any, even all, of these traits didn't ensure credibility because it was the work as a whole that elicited this response. The controversy over interest was in one sense a red herring; it was this term, 'credibility', which was the proper analogue for Fried's conviction. Nevertheless, arguing for a specificity that did not serve to differentiate the individual arts but only pertained to individual objects (which rendered it too specific - and therefore parodic - for Fried) as a criterion of value or quality was, and has remained, problematic. As both Robert Smithson and Rosalind Krauss pointed out at the time, there seemed to be a contradiction between Judd's espousal of specificity and the 'fugitive visual effects' of his own work.¹³ Moreover, the categories Judd proposed for these 'specific' objects were decidedly 'inspecific'. 'These categories,' Judd wrote, 'are categories only by the common presence of a single very general aspect. A person could select other common elements which would make other groups. The proportion of things not in common far exceeds the things that are. The things in common are, again, very general and inspecific.'¹⁴ Far from immutable, Judd's categories weren't even remotely stable and, since he argued that they were only 'categories after the fact, ones for discussion', they were antithetical to the precession of formalism's medium specificity.¹⁵

Discussions of the relationship between these critics tend to focus on the issue of quality rather than quantity, but the two were inextricably linked for Fried. Indeed, it was the contrast between his exclusivity and Judd's eclecticism that prompted statements like the following: 'I am holding against these critics,' he said at a symposium held at Brandeis University in 1966, 'a thing which it often seems they are enormously proud of – I mean the breadth and catholicity of their tastes, the sheer heterogeneity of the art they profess to admire.'¹⁶ Judd not only recognised but endorsed a plurality of practices, developing a critical vocabulary that, like his 'categories after the fact', derived from the work. Interest was certainly a necessary component of the judging process (since a work that was interesting merited the attention required to make finer distinctions), but it was neither the only nor the final criterion. If it was credible, the work was interesting; the converse, however, was not necessarily true. But Fried construed Judd's observation to mean that 'being (merely) interesting' was Judd's only requirement of the work rather than his point of departure for its assessment. For Fried, interest was a kind of code word for pluralism since, unlike specificity and wholeness, which were used to describe the particular qualities of a work, it applied to all the work Judd found worthy of attention - even that which in the end was 'not enough'. Thus, interest was opposed to quality after all, not because it didn't guarantee credibility (or conviction), but because it stood for the real problem Fried had with Judd's criticism: quantity. The 'breadth and catholicity' of Judd's taste were encapsulated in this term, signalling the lack of discrimination that Fried cited in a review of Judd's first one-person show (in which he also reviewed the criticism): '[W]hat has not clearly emerged in the criticism – at least my reading of it – is exactly how Judd means to discriminate between the objects he admires and those he does not.'¹⁷ By effectively reducing Judd's criticism to a single term, Fried ignored Judd's critical distinctions and impugned his judgement for its inability to rise above mere interest.

Yet it was not just 'the sheer heterogeneity' of the art Judd professed to admire that was at issue. At the Brandeis symposium Fried concluded that 'if someone likes that stuff - putting aside the question of what, in a given instance, that stuff is – I simply can't believe his claim that he is also moved or convinced or flattened by the work of Noland, say, or Olitski or Caro... It's not that I refuse to believe it, I really can't.'¹⁸ Liking the wrong stuff meant, axiomatically, that it was impossible to like the right stuff for any reason - and certainly not a valid one - at the same time; or, conversely, liking the right stuff for the right reasons automatically precluded liking the wrong stuff. As Fried said even more bluntly, 'I feel more desperate about what seems to me bad or meretricious criticism written in praise and, ostensibly, in elucidation of art I admire than I do about bad or meretricious art.'¹⁹ These comments find a likely target in Judd, who in fact liked 'that stuff' (since we can assume that this would include anything that didn't conform to Fried's definition of modernist painting or sculpture) as well as Noland. The real problem wasn't so much that Judd liked a wider variety of work. It was that liking 'that stuff' as well as Noland meant that Judd necessarily liked Noland for the wrong reason, even, or especially, when that reason was more-or-less the same as Fried's. Quantity and quality were mutually exclusive as far as Fried was concerned and there was no way to reconcile them. However, no longer hemmed in by the boundaries assumed by formalist criticism, Judd had developed a coherent system - or, better, a loose framework - for evaluating a broad range of work that started with interest but didn't end there. It was precisely because interest came off sounding ambivalent or non-judgemental (i.e. arbitrary) that Fried fixed on it in mounting his case against Judd's lack of discernment. But interest can be seen as both the barrier and the bridge between these critics (which also explains why Fried chose to focus on it), since it was the key to both the quantitative difference and the qualitative similarity between their critical judgements.

Rothkopf's use of the term 'interest' raises the issue of how - or maybe even whether - to gauge its current critical valence. In his review titled 'Subject Matters', interest isn't located in the object but in the subject; not in artists as subjects per se but, more specifically, in the subjects that matter to them. Although he doesn't employ it as a critical term in the same way Judd did (and I don't mean to conflate their uses of it), interest doesn't lack evaluative implications in Rothkopf's article. In a kind of introversion of Fried's contention that what mattered to Judd was whether the work was able 'to elicit and sustain his interest', Rothkopf finds himself confronted with the question of how a work based on whatever was able to elicit and sustain a given artist's interest might matter to him or the work's audience more generally. While Judd's interest involved the spectator's 'continuing attention directed at the object' as Fried put it, in this instance it might be characterised as the artist's 'continuing attention directed at a particular subject'. The work may or may not be interesting, but it is interested (in the sense of being endowed or invested with interest). Thus, rather than a mode of addressing an artwork, interest is the mode of address of the work itself. But what, we might ask, becomes of the viewer's - or more to the point the critic's - interest? If interest is, in a sense, preempted by the work, does Judd's term retain a critical function and, if so, how?

Broadly speaking, interest was the term Judd employed to make critical distinctions among a range of diverse practices. It is therefore no surprise that Foster, who was particularly concerned to retain the idea of an advanced art despite the dispersal of postmodernist practices (without relying on the model of the modernist narrative), adopted it in the increasingly pluralistic art world of the 1980s. '[Q]uality,' he wrote, 'is a criterion of normative criticism, an encomium bestowed upon aesthetic refinement; interest is an avant-gardist term, often measured in terms of epistemological disruption.'²⁰ Although for Foster, too, interest was related to judgement, its application was no longer restricted to objects; instead, it applied to an array of discursive practices and strategies whose value was a measure of their ability not to compel conviction but 'to cast doubt'. Foster connected interest, or value, with the postmodernist work's criticality, since, as he argued, '[T]he object of critical investigation becomes less the essence of a medium than "the social effect (function) of the work" and, more importantly, the intent of artistic intervention becomes less to secure a transcendental conviction in art than to undertake an immanent testing of its discursive rules and institutional regulations.'²¹ The evaluations Foster made using the term were distinct from Judd's, but they were nevertheless related to issues raised initially by minimalism. With postmodernism on the wane, Foster's construction of interest has fallen into disuse in its turn, and indeed, for Rothkopf, the current work's interestedness signals a disinterest in its larger social and political context.

Since the 1960s, then, interest has offered a point of departure for evaluating a plurality of practices that has now exploded into what Jerry Saltz calls the 'Super Paradigm', which he describes as 'pluralism gone wild, or a giant oil spill - sprawling but not evolving. Whatever, there's no avant-garde within it because there's nothing to react against.'²² This situation is by now old news, and Foster's has been one of the loudest voices raised against it for the last two decades. The difference between the Super Paradigm and the pluralism that Judd confronted is the result not only of the art world's decentering, but of its and the art market's (although whether it's still possible to distinguish between them is part of the issue) exponential growth in the interim. While Fried clung to the notion of a critical objectivity that depended on a predetermined historical narrative and what Judd considered ahistorical categories, Judd advocated a less totalising structure - a 'local history' - whose categories, as 'general and inspecific' as he imagined them to be, were historically determined. Fried, for his part, rejected the 'irreducible essence' of pictorial art (its 'two constitutive conventions') that was central to Greenbergian modernism because he considered it ahistorical, amending this theory by declaring that 'the task of the modernist painter is to discover those conventions that, at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing his work's identity as painting'. The acknowledgment that painting didn't have an irreducible essence meant that the criteria for judging it were subject to change as well; the critic's job was to identify which artists had discovered the relevant conventions and to elucidate their role in establishing the work's identity as painting. Judd didn't really differ as a critic in this respect, except that for him judgement wasn't a matter of identifying the historically viable conventions of a specific medium (in order to affirm its identity) but of distinguishing specific qualities that made art interesting at any given moment.

For Judd, singleness and specificity were the basis of the work's coherence in relation to the category of 'art in general'. When he wrote in his statement for the Primary Structures catalogue that 'if someone says his work is art, it's art', he didn't intend it as some kind of neo-Duchampian gesture (the preceding sentence reads: '"Non-art", "anti-art", "non-art art" and "anti-art art" are useless.').²³ Rather, it signalled his understanding that the aesthetic coherence of a work wasn't dependent on its identity as painting or sculpture but simply as art. If it wasn't defined by medium, the general category art could include anything, and, as a corollary, the work wasn't 'somehow meaningful only as form'.²⁴ If the work was whole enough, single enough, direct enough - that is, specific enough - to hold its own as art in general, then it was believable, or credible: it was, in short, 'enough'. And it was precisely the ability to inspire this kind of belief without relying on the conventions associated with a specific medium that made a given work powerful, to cite another of Judd's evaluative terms. Judd's belief that the categories to be used 'for discussion' were no longer preset or given meant that the work's own specificity became foregrounded, but comparison was still a crucial part of the judging process; differences between works still mattered - and mattered historically. However, the shape or form of that history was no more of a given than the categories 'painting' and 'sculpture'. As he said, 'The history of art and art's condition at any time are pretty messy. They should stay that way.'²⁵ Art's condition, and therefore its history, were the result of rather than the basis for synchronic comparisons between works whose strength nonetheless derived from their engagement with the art of the recent past. 'The singleness of objects,' Judd wrote, 'is related to the singleness of the best paintings of the early 1950s.'²⁶ Hence, local history.

Rothkopf also points to the local, relatively speaking, in his description of the Biennial, which, as he wrote, 'promised to be provincial - in the best possible sense of the word', its curatorial team having chosen to focus on 'zip codes in and around Chelsea and LA'. But the local group of practices that he alludes to has become unmoored from even the very loose and attenuated conception of history that Judd relied on. The Super Paradigm is itself a local term, since, like Judd's local history, it refers specifically to the New York art world, which of course occupies a much different place within the network that now makes up the art world writ large. Among its weaknesses, Saltz lists the Super Paradigm's 'vastness', its 'inability to form coherent groups' and 'a tendency to undervalue the local', and concludes that it 'processes everything individually'. Although the understanding that everything is processed (already a loaded term) individually might seem to resonate with Judd's specificity, this is not the case since this was the quality that distinguished a category of objects within the context of Judd's 'local history'. Cleaving the local and the categorical from the specific, the Super Paradigm is defined by its absolute specificity, or the kind of nominalism to which Fried believed Judd had acceded. But, for Judd, specificity was what allowed disparate practices to 'form coherent groups' - or categories for discussion - rather than signalling their complete atomisation. At this juncture, it might not be possible to think in terms of Judd's historical framework, since the totalising structure of the modernist narrative wasn't replaced by a different historical construct but, eventually, by the totalising structure of the art world. Once a way to frame a discussion of the work, interest has become the work's frame - with consequences for both the work and criticism.

In Rothkopf's view the majority of the work in the Biennial seemed to instantiate different versions of the statement 'I am interested in this', a sentence that includes two 'shifters'. As Rosalind Krauss explains, 'The shifter is [Roman] Jakobson's term for that category of linguistic sign which is "filled with signification" only because it is "empty". The word "this" is such a sign, waiting each time it is invoked for its referent to be supplied... The personal pronouns "I" and "you" are also shifters.'²⁷ What shifts from one work to the next are the subjects - both the enunciating subject and the subject matter to which 'this' refers. Rothkopf's review suggests that if the work doesn't move beyond this, we're left with a series of reiterations of the same statement, only by and about different subjects. This sameness means that interest is not linked to heterogeneity but to homogeneity; it points to a similarity shared by a range of practices not to the differences between them. And, like interest, specificity shifts from the object to the subject: a specific subject (an artist) is identified with a specific subject matter, which is often identified with specific materials, and these various specificities come together to produce what amounts to a signature style since, as Rothkopf points out, the work shown in the Biennial tended to be representative of the artist's project in general. 'There's Pynchon and Pevsner,' he writes, 'biker bars and hot rods, Hamburger Hill and southern LA - each appearing to function not simply as the premise for an isolated work but as evidence of a larger project, propelled in equal measure by research and fascination.' Judd, in thinking about the new three-dimensional work, wrote that, 'Materials vary greatly and are simply materials - formica, aluminium, cold-rolled steel, Plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific... There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material.'²⁸ The 'obdurate identity' of its materials separated the work from the artist's identity by setting this objectivity against the artist's subjectivity.

Here specificity has the opposite effect, linking the artist to both a personal interest and particular, often idiosyncratic, materials. The favoured subjects vary, ranging from preoccupations with Herman Melville and the Civil War to the gothic bent of artists like Banks Violette, David Altmejd and Aïda Ruilova, but most tend to be drawn, as Rothkopf says, 'from a particular class and vintage of pop-cultural material'. Rothkopf observes that 'many young American artists are staking out private parcels of the cultural landscape, choosing material that's personal enough to call their own but accessible enough to talk about with others'. General and specific are thus connected in his analysis as well: 'cultural signifiers' are general enough to resonate with an equally general audience, but subject matter is specific enough to differentiate individual projects. Writing about Altmejd's work, Jeffrey Kastner characterises a large structure included in a recent exhibition as 'a dramatic apotheosis of the artist's trademark gestures'.²⁹ Altmejd's materials - which include elegantly decaying fragments of simulated monster or werewolf carcasses displayed on cleanly designed stage sets or within intricately compartmentalised structures offset by theatrical lighting, costume jewellery and mirrored lattices - have quickly become recognisable if not altogether familiar. Kastner, whose enthusiasm for the work is evident, ends his review on a cautionary note: 'That Altmejd consistently manages to orchestrate real conceptual lucidity from these wild constellations of materials is a credit to his substantial skill. Yet it's also plain that the fact that they cohere around what has, in only a handful of shows, become so inevitable a mode of address has the capacity to become something of a liability (recently overheard on 24th Street: "Did you see the David Altmejd show yet?" "Oh, you mean the werewolf guy?").'³⁰ Interest might have moved from the object to the subject in one sense, but the inverse is also true: interest was the viewing subject's response to the object according to Judd; in this case the maker's interest becomes objectified.

The synchronic character of the artist's project, which doesn't appear to develop so much as spread according to this reading, therefore mimics that of the pluralism of the art world. 'The studio used to be seen as diachronic,' writes Lane Relyea, 'toiling under neglect, the artist made work not for some waiting audience but out of previous work and towards future work. His or her project was sustained by being conceived as a narrative succession, a kind of bildungs-roman or life story that gained value by mirroring, even internalising, the progression of art in general. Today the studio is synchronic; artworks inside it get constructed not in private and historically but in public through a seemingly static network.'³¹ Just as the studio's diachrony mirrored that of the 'progression of art', now the synchrony of the artist's project reflects that of the Super Paradigm. This is true not only at the level of artistic production, as Relyea suggests, but increasingly at the level of the project itself. Their personal preoccupations notwithstanding, these projects can't recoup the erstwhile privacy of the studio since their publics have only become more insistent. As Brian Sholis recently remarked in an article on New York graduate programmes' open studios, 'It's difficult to freely toy with an idea in the studio when someone is hovering with chequebook in hand and power players are discussing you in the elevator in terms borrowed from the futures market. The temptations pressure students to become impresarios - PT Barnums whose main attraction is their own work.'³²

Interest is perhaps both a symptom of and a response to this situation: if the main attraction is the artist's work, it's only a short slide to the main attraction being artists (or their fixations) themselves. On the other hand, the turn to personal interests might be a kind of reaction-formation in the face of this public encroachment. In the best-case scenario, this might allow for the kind of preemptive reification that Foster identifies with Marcel Broodthaers's work where 'a personal reification is assumed - sometimes homeopathically, sometimes apotropaically - against a social reification that is enforced'.³³ But the close alignment of these projects with what Baudrillard called the 'project of lived experience' implies that, more often, they become a sign for that reification instead. '[O]bjects of consumption,' writes Baudrillard, 'constitute an idealist lexicon of signs, an elusive materiality to which the project of lived existence is referred ... there are no longer any projects; there are only objects. Or rather, the project has disappeared: it is satisfied in its realisation as a sign located in the object. The object of consumption quite precisely is that in which the project is "re-signed".'³⁴ The implication here is that the project is no longer re-signed but simply signed by the object. It's therefore no coincidence that Rothkopf singles out those artists whose interests appear to provide a 'point of departure rather than arrival' as having somehow managed to circumvent or stave off - to use a particularly Friedian term - this reification. Because the projects of artists such as Dave Muller, Andrea Zittel and T.J. Wilcox open out toward something beyond personal interest according to Rothkopf, they are not, or perhaps not fully, resigned to their own reification. Similar to Judd but in a very different way, Rothkopf considers interest a valid point of departure but not an end in itself. (And it's worth noting, too, that the work of these artists has another aspect in common: there is an engagement with or acknowledgment of history, even if it's only personal or fictional.)

Echoing Kastner's circumspection, Rothkopf says more generally, 'Regrettably, the kind of subject matter that I have been describing seems to be putting many artists in something of a bind. On one hand, it automatically connects them to a whole universe of meaning (and an initiated audience of fellow cultural customers). But its loaded specificity seems to make it all the more difficult to transcend, and often the resulting work isn't any more interesting than the initial source material.' For Rothkopf, too, interest – used here in Judd's sense – is connected to the specificity of materials, except of course in this case specificity refers to the artist's chosen subject matter, or interests. His disappointment in the work's inability to transcend this specificity might sound almost Friedian but for the fundamental difference in the connotation of the word 'transcendence', which he uses generically rather than, as Fried did, in reference to 'grace'. Rothkopf isn't lamenting the work's lack of transcendence but that of its component source materials. Although this lack of transcendence is redolent of Judd's 'direct' use of materials, the sources in question are 'cultural signifiers' which are already connected to 'a whole universe of meaning' rather than 'obdurate matter'. It was precisely because the new materials lacked any connection to conventional (art) meanings that Judd recognised their potential. Similarly, for Rothkopf, the conventionality of these cultural signifiers hinders their ability to produce an interesting work.

Meyer has argued that minimalism not only reflected but was constituted by a field of differential strategies or positions (although the field he identifies is not as diverse as the one Judd saw emerging at the time). The 'private parcels of the cultural landscape' that Rothkopf refers to are not position-takings in the same sense, since it's not the positions or strategies of these projects that differ but the shifters' referents. Pluralism has increasingly meant that not just anything but everything can be art, which might explain how interests themselves could come to constitute the work but not whether it might still make sense to talk about interest in Judd's sense. Arguably the migration of interest from the viewer's response to a work to the artist's response to a particular subject - at least as far as the term's employment by these critics is concerned - involves the assumption (in both senses of the term) of interest by the work: the work's interestedness implies that it is assumed to be interesting. By this reading, Judd's very different understanding of the term might be linked to Rothkopf's after all. This seems to be the crux of the problem: if interest is taken for granted - if, that is, the work is always already interesting - we risk winding up without a field of practices to differentiate between. For, if the only thing that distinguishes one work from another is whether it reveals an interest in slasher flicks or video games, where does that leave us? Internalised within the work, interest becomes an acknowledgement that the critical distinctions it once stood for have been displaced.

Fried's misreading of Judd's use of the term 'interest' was meant to strip it of its framing capacity: it was the wrong frame. Judd, as Fried feared, was prescient in discerning the dispersal of art practices that was to come, although Judd himself was unprepared for its consequences. He nevertheless offered a model for a critical response to a plurality of practices, or art in general, that took historical context into account. Using the term interest, among others, to delineate a 'local history' provided a new framework for understanding (and appreciating) a broader range of work. Interest is charged with a framing function in Rothkopf's review as well; but with the increasing discursivity of artworks themselves, and the devaluation of both the local and the categorical as viable means of relating the practices of a growing number of artists, the current work's interestedness makes it appear to be framed before, or maybe even against, criticism. However, if it's left up to the market to decide what's interesting - if, as Jeff Koons put it, 'the market is the critic now' - then art making will mirror the logic of capital.³⁵ Craig Owens, glossing Baudrillard, wrote that, 'what we consume is the object not in its materiality but in its difference - the object as sign'.36 Rothkopf's critical siting of interest might prompt us to ask whether, in the absence of a critical discourse that can address the current pluralism, we will reach a point where what gets produced is the object as sign. Or, following Judd, we can ask whether a work that is always already interesting is enough.

— Mary Leclère