The deluge of available information on American artists from the 1960s on is both a blessing and a curse to art historians. Since the 1960s, most artists have been audiotaped or videotaped talking about their work; because of changes in how they are trained, artists have become increasingly sophisticated in talking about their work and cooperating with critics to shape the interpretation of it. But where does this leave the historian?

The Dia Art Foundation curator Lynne Cooke raised this question yesterday at a panel, sponsored by the Judd Foundation and held in the Museum of Modern Art’s new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, on the use of oral histories for preserving artists’ legacies. Both Mo-MA and the Judd Foundation are pursuing oral-history projects intended to record the practice and intentions of late-20th-century artists.

Ms. Cooke, who co-curated the Richard Serra retrospective opening at MoMA on June 3, warned that oral histories “are not revelations of truth” but “simply texts that we work with.” She offered as an example an oft-quoted passage from an essay by Mr. Serra, in which he described a memory of going, when he was 4 years old, with his father to see an oil tanker being dropped into the ocean: There was “a moment of tremendous anxiety, as the oiler en route rattled, swayed, tipped, and bounced into the sea, half-submerged, to then raise and lift itself and find its balance,” Serra wrote. “All the raw material that I need is contained in the reserve of this memory, which has become a recurring dream.”

This passage has been cited so often, Ms. Cooke argued, because of its suggestion of intimacy and its reference to Mr. Serra’s childhood — both of which are rare among the artist’s statements. But the memory has clearly been carefully honed. “Seductive and informative as [such] accounts may be,” Ms. Cooke said, the art historian should not take them at face value.

But even though the panelists, like Ms. Cooke, carefully noted the risks in accepting artists’ own statements about their art, their measured, scholarly warnings were drowned out by the voices of artists themselves. Each panelist presented excerpts — mostly film clips, and in one case, an audio clip — from interviews or oral histories they had conducted.

The art historian Avis Berman, who is conducting an oral history project for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, played an excerpt of an interview with the artist Allan Kaprow, about his role in introducing Lichtenstein to Leo Castelli and Castelli’s then partner Ivan Karp. Kaprow remembers Karp saying that Lichtenstein’s comicstyle paintings were much better and more realized than those of another artist the gallery was considering. “Who?” Kaprow recalls that he asked, and Karp replied: “Andrew Warhola.” (Warhola was Andy Warhol’s original name.)

The chairman of PaceWildenstein, Arne Glimcher, played clips from two of his “The Artist’s Studio with Arne Glimscher” interviews for Plum TV, with Chuck Close and John Chamberlain. Mr. Close comes across as gentle and self-deprecating, while Mr. Chamberlain is ornery and hilarious, a master of one-liners that hide as much as they reveal. When Mr. Glimcher asked Mr. Chamberlain about his relationship with Willem de Kooning, for instance, Mr. Chamberlain responded by telling a story about going to see de Kooning one afternoon and having a long conversation about a novel they had both liked by Salvador Dalí. Mr. Chamberlain concluded, “That was such a terrific afternoon I decided never to see him again.”

An art adviser who began working for Andy Warhol in 1969, Vincent Fremont, showed a clip of his and his wife Shelly Dunn Fremont’s film “Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story,” about the Warhol superstar. The incredible monologue he showed, in which Ms. Berlin channels her socialite mother haranguing her after the release of “Chelsea Girls,”underlined the potentially performative aspect of oral histories, especially filmed ones. (Elsewhere in the film, Ms. Berlin is described as having taped her phone arguments with her mother and sold them to Warhol for $25 a tape; he turned them into the play “Pork.”)

Donald Judd’s daughter and the president of the Judd Foundation, Rainer Judd, said that what she found most compelling about the clips the other panelists showed was their revelation of “the human quality” in their often famous subjects. The Judd Foundation, as Ms. Judd and the foundation’s executive director, Barbara Hunt McLanahan, noted, recently began its own oral-history project, conducting interviews with people about Judd’s move to Marfa, Texas, from New York in the 1970s and his reception there.

Ms. McLanahan and the director of MoMA, Glenn Lowry, who served as the panel’s moderator, referred glancingly to the foundation’s past difficulties: Mr. Lowry, who is a former trustee, expressed “great pride in the steps that have been made to put the foundation in good order.” Ms. McLanahan said that now that the foundation has an endowment and an operating budget — thanks to a $24 million Judd-only auction last year at Christie’s — “we’re moving forward with the things we need to do to preserve Judd’s legacy.”

The auction, at which the foundation sold 35 pieces from the estate, triggered considerable controversy. Many people argued that the foundation should have tried tosell the works to museums first, and the artist’s former girlfriend, Marianne Stockebrand, resigned from the foundation board.