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In recent years, a small but prolific network of French magicians and their allies have taken calculated, systematic, and very public steps to reposition magic as a form of high culture, produced and received according to a set of distinctively artistic criteria, and linked institutionally to the realm of fine arts. They call what they are doing ‘new magic’ (la magie nouvelle). This article takes a conversation analytic approach to a verbal disagreement between one of new magic’s principal proponents and a relatively senior music scholar who questions how art-like new magic really is. The speakers mutually accomplish the activity of arguing by realizing associated design features such as negative personal assessments, overlapping talk, format tying, sarcasm, bald directives, and interruption. In so doing, they also co-construct interactional identities as cultural insurgent and cultural gatekeeper, shaping this particular speech event as a skirmish in a conflictual and unresolved process of artification. [author summary]