Jacob Wick interviews Lane Relyea, whose book Your Everyday Art World was published in 2013 by MIT Press.

Relyea, who also authored the article D.I.Y. Abstraction, remarks on how he sees: "artists starting to operate… especially painters. Painters do blogs, they curate, they run an apartment gallery—painting is something that they get to when they can, you know? It’s one of the things that they operate in a field of instrumentalization.  … you can’t ring somebody’s bell under present conditions if you’re painting like Velasquez." He continues, commenting that "the social identity of the painter can be salvaged and recuperated for today: by reconceiving it as the painter who always goes to parties, curates shows, writes a blog. Somebody who’s like, wow, when does he ever have time to make those paintings? And the paintings look like it. They’re small, they’re more sketchlike in a way… One of the ways I’m talking about painting now is trying to talk about these little casual abstractions that look like something a painter could do when they can find a few hours in the studio when they can actually perform the role of the painter, instead of the residency-runner or the blog-poster. That’s talking about the work, but trying to talk about the work within its context. And more and more, the context tends to override the object."