John Baldessari, 'Animal Crackers in My Soup,' 2012. (Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles-based artist John Baldessari quietly arrived in New York to get his license renewed. Assuming the reviews are decent for his latest exhibition here, which opened Oct. 19 at the spacious 57th Street gallery of his longtime dealer, Marian Goodman, Mr. Baldessari will, he said, get his “license as an artist” extended. Now 81, he has been going through the process annually (or pretty close to annually, with shows somewhere or another in the world) for many years, and by all appearances, he wears the effort lightly. Sitting in the gallery last week, decked out in the standard art world uniform of all black below his signature white chin-strap beard, surrounded by several of the 13 pieces in his new series “Double Play,” he described to The Observer what’s involved in the license renewal. “The whole test,” he said breezily in his SoCal drawl, “is: can I get away with this?”

Lately Mr. Baldessari has been making it very difficult for others to get away with things. The last time he was in the news, just a few months ago, was when he became the first artist to resign from the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, after the museum parted ways with its longtime chief curator, Paul Schimmel. It is perhaps a testament to Mr. Baldessari’s influence that the three other artist board members—Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha—swiftly followed suit. Much of that influence comes from the quarter century he has spent, off and on, as a professor at CalArts and UCLA, two of the most celebrated MFA programs in the country, where, up until his retirement four years ago, he taught artists like Cindy Sherman, Meg Cranston, David Salle, Tony Oursler and the late Mike Kelley. A recent graduate at UCLA was Dawn Kasper, one of the stars of the most recent Whitney Biennial. Assignments in his Post-Studio class at CalArts—recently the subject of an exhibition at San Francisco’s Wattis Institute, and documented in the book Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment—included “imitate Baldessari in actions and speech. Video,” “Put new canvas over old painting” and “Develop a visual code. Give it to another student to crack.”

An admired educator of younger artists—though he tends to shrug this off by saying things like, “One thing I want to make clear is, I only taught to make money and there wasn’t anything noble about it”—he is, in his own most recent work, a borrower from older ones. The pieces in “Double Play” all have as their jumping-off points tiny details taken from classic paintings. Mr. Baldessari would prefer not to tell his viewers where, precisely, they come from. Suffice it to say that Chardin, Courbet and Manet make appearances. He crops these details, enlarges them, and prints them directly onto canvas, then touches up the final product with paint.

That’s where the high-art part ends. The titles of the pieces, which are written on the canvas in block letters, come from popular songs. One of them is called Animal Crackers in My Soup, a Shirley Temple ditty. All of this gels with the two-step Mr. Baldessari has long danced between the most rigorous forms of conceptual art—like having found text applied to canvases by sign painters in works such as What Is Painting? (1966-68)—and imagery from pop culture—like the black-and-white B-movie stills in Heel (1986). “I always think of art as a conversation,” he said in the gallery. He has no truck with “epater la bourgeoisie,” the avant-garde’s calling card since the 19th century. “I don’t have that idea of the fucking bourgeoisie—that I don’t care about them. I do care. But I don’t want to make it easy, either.”

John Baldessari, 'Feelings,' 2012. (Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

However difficult or easy he’s making it on others, of late he’s had a lot of love from the art world. His first retrospective exhibition was back in 1980, at the New Museum in New York. Two years ago, his most recent one, the sprawling “John Baldessari: Pure Beauty,” made stops, and was well-received, at the Tate in London (which organized the show), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum. But the love had an edge. “Well, you know the conventional wisdom around artists is you sort of get kicked upstairs on the shelf,” he said. “And that has happened, to a certain extent.”

In the run-up to “Pure Beauty,” his prices rose, buoyed by a surging art market. In 2007, Quality Material, a text painting he made in the late 1960s, broke his worldwide auction record when it sold at Christie’s for $4,408,000, more than doubling its presale estimate.

Nevertheless, he is skeptical of the way in which money has come to dominate discussions of art. (He discourages his students from thinking of art as a particularly remunerative career choice. “I keep saying, ‘Be a plumber, you’d make more money.’”) In 1975, when he and Andy Warhol were both showing with New York’s Sonnabend Gallery, he ran into the British artist duo Gilbert and George there. They’d come to have their portrait done by Warhol and asked Mr. Baldessari why he didn’t get his painted as well. “I told them, he’s just selling out. He’s just making money. And he was. But you know. It’s consensus. The culture decides what’s art. And the artist just puts it forward.”

And yet, his work figures prominently in the Metropolitan Museum’s current blockbuster, “Regarding Warhol.” Clearly that museum, at least, sees him as having been influenced by Andy. He himself isn’t so sure. “All these shows, you have to ask yourself, with all those artists that are included, would they have not done that work had Warhol not existed? It’s kind of a chicken and egg thing.” If Warhol had any effect on his work, he said, it was “in a negative way”: to distinguish himself from Warhol and Rauschenberg, who both used silkscreens, he printed photos directly onto canvases by treating them with photographic emulsion.

The Met show runs through Dec. 31, and his new show at Marian Goodman is on view through Nov. 21. By then, Mr. Baldessari will have long since returned to the West Coast. In the ’80s, he was doing the bicoastal thing for a while, and had what he calls “a vacation house” in the West Village. But these days his trips to the city are quick—just enough time to renew his license and, in a move that perhaps harks back to his days as a teacher, give his viewers a bit of a test, too. “It’s kind of an art history test,” he said about the pieces in “Double Play.” Then again, he doesn’t want people to get caught up in the pop quiz aspect. “It’s like a new couple dating, and someone does a background check,” he said and laughed warmly. “You just want to be liked for yourself.”

rjovanovic@observer.com