We Have Always Been Transgenic: A Dialogue Steve Baker and Carol Gigliotti Abstract This dialogue concerns the nature of ethical responsibility in contempo- rary art practice, and its relation to questions of creativity; the role of writing in shaping the perception of transgenic art and related practices; and the problems that may be associated with trusting artists to act with integrity in the unchartered waters of their enthusiastic engagement with genetic technologies. Keywords Art practice · Transgenic art · Ethics · Aesthetics · Genetics · Postmodernism Introductory Remarks This email conversation, stemming from Steve Baker reading Carol Gigliotti’s essay, “Leonardo’s Choice,” and conducted on an occasional basis from November 2004 to March 2005, emerged as a format in which we hoped to be able to explore both our common interest in contemporary artists’ engagement with questions of ethics and animal life, and the significant differences in our own approaches to those questions. Both of us were in the middle of writing books considering aspects of these issues in more detail, which may explain why we seemed sometimes to have too much to say, without always managing to say it very clearly. The conversation touches— sometimes only very lightly—on issues that include the following: the nature of ethical responsibility in contemporary art practice, and its relation to questions of creativity; the role of writing in shaping the perception of transgenic art and related practices; and the problems that may be associated with trusting artists to act with integrity in the uncharted waters of their enthusiastic engagement with genetic tech- nologies. Running through much of the conversation is a tension between what is perceived by each party as the adoption of a wide or too narrow focus: is the wider focus to see this area of art practice as something that should be viewed in a simi- lar manner to other forms of contemporary art, where an artist’s “proper business” S. Baker (B ) Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire, UK e-mail: sbaker1@uclan.ac.uk 75 C. Gigliotti (ed.), Leonardo’s Choice, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2479-4_5, C  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Licensed to Carol Gigliotti<gigliott@eciad.bc.ca>