"...One of the drawbacks to the sorts of analysis I do tends to be that all the complexities, personal motivations and particular histories and so on of the single person's work may get flattened by that analysis. That's right, but there are certain things you can only see by looking at them in that way. The art world's pretty good at producing monographic studies. There are lots and lots of them out there. More than anything else, and usually tied to promotional purposes. I guess my instincts intellectually are to look at the characteristics of a particular field and try to work against those. It's extremely frustrating actually -- and students feel this and I do too -- that it's so hard to find larger synthetic accounts. They may well have their faults and you may well want to pull them apart and disagree with them but if they didn't exist you wouldn't be able to do that, and the fact of their paucity is an ideological matter."