'The Gift' just keeps on giving

The book has two halves, and the first builds a theory of gift exchange and the second applies it to some cases in art. To do the theory, I chose folk tales and mythology because they are closer in their language and their imaginative universe to the world of art. Most of the work on gift exchange comes out of social science, either out of anthropology or some branches of economics. It's interesting, but it's not as figurative in its language. So I turn to them as a way of widening what's already known in the social sciences.

Is there a sense that in using stories from all over the world you're getting at something universal, or essential, or timeless, or something like that?

This is, of course, a cultural debate we've had for some time now, whether there are essential and timeless categories like this. In a sense, yes, using folk tales and myths was an attempt to get the argument out of the particular and into a more general language.

You talk about a tension, a disconnect, between the artist's inspiration and his ability to take his work into the marketplace. But haven't many artists, especially since Warhol and going back at least to Shakespeare, been quite adept at the marketplace?

Yes, of course. And my argument is not that artists can't do that -- they can, and I think it's wonderful when they succeed. But I think there's this double economy nonetheless.

Just to take Warhol as a quick example: He was quite cunning about commercializing fine art. But the fact is the largest last piece of his was a series of over 100 silk-screens, which was funded by the Dia Art Foundation. To do a large-scale work of that kind, Warhol still needed a patron. So you always find this mix, even in someone as commercially canny as Warhol.

It does seem that artists and novelists have lost some of their distance from the marketplace, some of their disdain for it. We know that Tom Wolfe, for instance, just left his longtime publisher for one that's given him a bigger advance. It seems much more common these days to talk about art and literature with a dollar sign attached. Does this seem different from when you were writing the book in the '70s?

Probably not. I think there's always been a star system that has that kind of element. But the thing to realize when you're talking about a writer like Tom Wolfe is that this is like talking about the very best baseball or basketball players in the world, and there are 100,000 people who are not at that level, who I'm thinking about.