Artists/curators who use interviews in their work:

Tirza
Richard Fung, My Mother’s Place (1990); the artist calls this an exercise in “autoethnography.” He interviews his mother about her life and introduces home movies and snapshots as “evidence” of their family history; in voice-over he explains that these images reflect the way his family wished to live more than any lived reality.

Duane
Vanessa Beecroft—casting call, interview part of process of assembling her performance pieces. The film The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins follows Vanessa Beecroft’s quest to adopt orphaned twins, Madit and Mongor Akot, and how this interfaces with her art practices. Interviews with Beecroft who herself employs interviews in the work are figured centrally.

Nicole
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Curator who relies on interviews in his curatorial practice. “The point of departure for all of my work is conversations with artists.” He has conducted over 300 interviews since 1993. His book Interviews is a compendium containing many of these. The uncontextualized documents are an important component of the catalogs accompanying his exhibitions. He never writes curatorial essays. He has curated several live round-the-clock interview marathons and incorporates interviews in his “lectures” by calling artists on a speaker phone.

Rio
Compares the experience of interviewing with the process of portrait photography. This spurred thoughts about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who collected a series of phrases and dates that “add up” to a portrait of the subject (who is invited to supplement the composite with additional information). FGT’s Self-Portrait (1993) unfolds as a list of dates with significant people, events, spectacles, news items, pets, itineraries, encounters, glimpses of poignant objects and environments associated.

Rebecca
Anna Deavere Smith, responds to Crown Heights riots, reenacts Al Sharpton discussing James Brown’s hair and an Hasidic Jew about the significance of conventions of women’s coiffure, among other interview subjects, in Fires in the Mirror (1993).

Comment by TL
Oral history as the basis of creative performance practice, other egs:
• E. Patrick Johnson
• Laremie Project

Kaif
Sophie Ernst interviews people in Pakistan about how they perceive Allah, death, spirituality. Projects images of her interview subjects on the ground of classical sculpture such as The Dying Gaul. In another project, she projects images of people with whom she has questioned about their ideas of what it is like in America. In Jannat (2006), she interviews men about their concept of heaven and creates a multimedia environment with animated and sculptural components.

Jade
Jim Goldberg, uses interviews in works as Raised by Wolves, picture and text narratives of street life in LA and San Francisco. Hospice and Nursing Home in conjunction with Nan Goldin.

Nicola
Sophie Calle, French conceptual artist creates projects that are loosely based on interviews. One key example: Address Book (1983)departs from a found address book, which she xeroxes and returns. She then calls the people whose numbers she has culled and asks them what they think of the owner of the address book.

Gabrielle
Errol Morris, director of Pet Cemetary. Fog of War is another example of his work in which, typically, unnarated stories are told purely through interviews. The interrogator is hardly heard or seen in the film.

Michael
Josh Greene, Consultation; this piece revolves around his conversation (consultation) with a chimp about career options. Adopts filmic conventions such as the close-up and shot-reverse-shot that elicit viewer identification with one or more participants, establishing the power dynamics in an exchange. Another eg is the project unlicensed therapy which reproduces the therapeutic dialog.

Courtney
Beatriz Santiago Munoz video documents three locations in the East Bay, conducting interviews with inhabitants, then stages reenactments of these exchanges in an attempt to construct a collage-like history of anarchy in the Bay Area. Her own voice is rarely heard. Her subjects sometimes perform their own stories and sometimes swap with other participants, decentering the origin points of these urban stories.

Rory
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson East Coast West Coast (1969) collaborative experiment in video in which Holt and Smithson impersonate the subjects of an artist-interviewer exchange.

Jennine [absent, but participating electronically]
Sophie Calle’s work has manifested in various ways, the interview being one form of inquiry that she has returned to several times. A recent piece, from 2007, entitled Take Care of Yourself was inspired by a break-up letter from a boyfriend. The title of the work was drawn from the letter’s closing sentence. She requested responses to the letter from various professionals, who analyzed or responded to the letter in various ways. The resulting texts were shown in juxtaposition with photographs of their writers. The project also included video of several performers acting the letter out. Calle defines this work as an “investigation” saying “The idea came to me to develop an investigation through various women's professional vocabulary. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/141769.html”
Although it doesn’t follow a traditional interview format it seems to me to fit into the broad definition on interview “An interview is a conversation between two or more people (the interviewer and the interviewee) where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interview. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interview” What results is a composite response that reflects on love and loss.
In an earlier work Calle interviewed random people on the street eliciting recollections of monuments that were now destroyed - The Detachment (1996)
Another early work, Art Museum (1995), consisted of descriptions of several paintings which had been stolen. For this project she interviewed various museum staff members.

Crossfire

This is the John Stewart-Crossfire interview.  It is quite a scathing critique of the media, the news interview format, and responsibility. 

If so, then, why?