Our first seminar in the second semester dealt with interviews in the art world. Often misunderstood or viewed with outright disdain by so called 'insiders', interviews may be prone to sycophantic fluff - comfortable filler for some magazine or other media - but if executed correctly, they can yield invaluable insight into the work of an artist or creative individual, and their methodology.
Though an interview was originally intended to be used as a journalistic device - where two individuals converse for the benefit of a newspaper's readers, in recent decades however, the interview has undergone a paradigm shift. From a lowly narrative device it has progressed through the echelons of accepted information gathering techniques to become a recognized and dependable method of extracting valuable information from a subject.
Furthermore, if employed as a research method they can provide first hand information that is directly relevant to what you are working on - there is no data mining, no need to go the exhausting lengths required in surveys or questionnaires. instead you are able to evaluate what is being said by the subject/subjects on the fly - encouraging improvisation by the interviewer and therefore provoking them to think of relevant questions which may have previously been overlooked.
It seems to me that the most prevalent incarnation of the interview is the televised debate - chat shows, true sport for the masses make up the vast majority of such (im)material purely because of their incessant propensity to achieve prime time billing - perhaps down to mindset of the people who have nothing to do at 10 am on a weekday - although i feel thats a matter far beyond the remit of this lowly reflective statement. Close behind is the gutter press with publication such as 'the sun' and 'heat' magazine sitting on their thrones as the king and queen of societies easily led; then comes the special interest magazines - heres where you can find diamonds in the rough - if you're prepared to look - with film magazine empire's pint of milk a short, versatile and easy going favorite of mine - although it can be said that this particular example smacks of hypocrisy - i simply cannot ignore the insight into the mind of someone offered by their estimation of the cost of something so mundane as a pint of milk.
From its inception the interview has always drawn an audience - no matter how small (even the interviewer is an audience in the truest sense of the word). I believe it is this 'audience' which has proved the chagrin of many a critic, regardless of the medium - written, audio or visual - pressure is always applied by this audience, and in many cases this can lead to the sacrifice of a certain amount of journalistic integrity on the part of the publisher in order to gain the favor of highly critical readers in a marketplace saturated by the promise of a mass media spectacle in the form of the hottest gossip - put simply: an interview with someone they want to hear from.
What's even more crippling is that if the subject did not like the outcome of an interview - they may not want to come back - and choose one of your competitors instead. All this in a world where brand loyalty is being eroded by the constant encroachment of high cash-figure marketing schemes, one could be forgiven for thinking - what's the point in maintaining my integrity?
(Incidentally the price of a pint of milk was 49 pence at time of writing)
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