YouSaid · the spoken record

David Salle

lines on the record: 55
first: 2021-11-03
most recent: 2021-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Actually, just leaks out. And what's left is, I don't know if it's opposite is exactly right, but something very different. Let's put it this way, Tyler. Making a painting, as you just said, even appropriating something is a lot of work. Making a painting is a lot of work. Making a painting that hangs together, holds together the elements hold together. The colors are in the right intervals and all the formal elements work and the submatter elements work. It's a hell of a lot of work. To go to all that trouble just to be a smart ass, it's kind of not worth it. You have to have a little bit bigger game in mind. So, you know, I think anyone makes a painting on any level is trying to communicate something fairly complex and fairly involves with, for better words, human emotions and that the, again, the language that returns us to our original question, the language that we use talk about these things.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the second part is true, the surprise part, obviously, depends on who you ask on what day, I wonder, and I don't know if it would be possible to make a survey or who would give you an honest answer, I wonder if every artist, or whether how many artists feel the use to which their work has been put in public and the fact that it's been put to any use at all is already a huge privilege and something that I'm grateful for, and I think everyone is grateful for. However, if I'm trying to rephrase it, if the gap between the way one's work has been perceived and the way one perceives it oneself, how big is that gap? Why is it so big? Is the fact that it's a gap, it's a failure on the part of the artist, quite possibly. That's certainly one way to read it, is it simply a matter more time is necessary. I like to think that's the answer, but I could be wrong. Over time, the acid in the paintings gets dialed downward.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wish it were true It seems as though the avant-garde is no more protected from puritanicalism than in the other segment of society. I think I was wrong on that one, I think it was wishful thinking.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am somewhat vague myself on what it even says now. There have been some cases. I'm not sure how they were settled or to what extent their landmarks, but I do feel that in terms of visual culture, I've spent a good part of my career appropriating things that other people did. You could say it's just wrong, it's theft, and that would be certainly a position that would be hard to argue with. My position is very different. Everything that exists exists in the present tense and that everything can be material for someone else without violating its original status. And one thing doesn't impinge on the other, and it doesn't need to be protected because if it's any good, it protects itself. That's my view. I don't know what the law says.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make out of this crime drama metaphors of almost every dilemma in American society from the inability of the individual to be different, to be survive, all these issues which now think of as commonplace, that he could locate them inside of a weekly drama about crime family still seems to me to be miraculous and also a model for what art can do, how it should think of itself. engagement with certain givens and then who the hell knows where it's going to go after that.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much like the way I think about painting, when I think about art in general, what the sopranos shows is someone who took the conventions of the day, gangsters, mafia, cops, and made out of it something which hadn't existed, psychological realism that had a texture, a most granular texture of life as it's lived so that people who haven't, I mean, most of us have no encounters with the mafia, really. We all imagined that we were part of the mafia and we all imagined that we all projected ourselves into these families and social groups in which this mafia behavior was completely normalized. David Chase made out of this convention something so psychologically dense, so much about the family, the damage that families do to one another, the constraints of society versus the individual, the stifling of imagination.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Harold Weird film, a guy who works in a bank who's never had a drink in his life and finally gets laid off at the bank, takes the money, his severance pay, goes to a bar for the first time in his life. And then we see him the next morning having purchased a circus. She brings home. He's living with his sister anyway. Crazy Preston Sturgis' plot. Now, Sturgis is fabulous. I think about a lot”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a great film, it's a great achievement, the crowd scenes, the image of the town. I love Sturge's depiction of a town, the life of a town. His other films are centered on much smaller social groups. This is Frank Capra film. Maybe Solomon's travels is the most delicious. I don't know. They're also great.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're all so great. I think the one I've seen the most doesn't mean I think it's necessarily the greatest, but what I've seen the most is the Lady Eve. I've seen it at least 20 times. I still laugh. I still cracks me up. I kind of think of Sturgeon's all five of the great films as one film. It's like one super long film, which just keeps playing in my head. Hail the Conquering Hero is certainly the most complex. And in a way, almost painful, psychologically painful.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grasp, and he continues to epitomize something about that time and place, the late 40s to the mid 60s, late 60s, which still remains a touchstone and also still full of mystery and full of sensibility. Let's say it's where one finds the roots of a certain sensibility, which for me is still very much alive, maybe not for anybody else. He is the certain kind of painter's poet parc salance. He is the poet of nouns, poet of things, the poet of appearances, and the poet of connections between things. I mean, in a way, he's the perfect poet. It's a list of names, but it's more than a list of names. What happened at the party, but it's also about mortality. It's about beauty. It's also about degradation. And it's very accessible and very musical. I don't think it's an accident. I think many painters are”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frank was important to Alex for a number of reasons. The most important reason is that Alex is a great consumer of and connoisseur of poetry generally and New York school poetry in particular. They were contemporaries and friends. So it's inconceivable that Alex wouldn't have been interested in or close to Franco Hara. Unfortunately, I didn't get to meet Franco Hera, but I discovered his poetry when I was a kid. It spoke to me for whatever reason.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it has a spiritual component of Buddhist scholar rock or something of the sort. Sometimes it's something of relatively insignificant. It's a reminder or a link to a whole nother world or another experience.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do find artists collect from more an informational standpoint. The artist owes nothing to the art world vis- ⁇-vis their collection. The artist isn't making a statement about the world in their collection, or is the artist judged by their collection. The collection is a really private matter. It's more like a library. So I know, for example, that my friend Jeff Coons collects Courbet paintings, which I would too if I could afford them. I think that's great. He doesn't collect art like his own. He collects art very, very different from his own. I collect things that are very different from what I make. I don't actually live with my work in the house. The way in which an artist uses another artist's work is sometimes very eccentric and hard to trace or hard to see at first. I think artist collections have more to do with wanting to be reminded about something, wanting to be nudged by something, wanting to have something as a touchstone.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of the really great ones, I mean, active ones, sooner or later, maybe just have a practical considerations, have wanted to share that collection with the public, which is kind of American system that we've evolved.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure, Teller, I can think of what they have in common. They seem to me, and I would probably add a bunch of other names, it's hard to generalize about them, honestly. They seem so different one from another. I guess you could say the motivations are similar. For some reason, this work speaks to them and they have arranged their lives in such a way as to be to a certain extent defined themselves defined by this body of work that they've created, they've collected and created the work, they've created the context for the work. It's a kind of transference, producerial arrangement. I mean, it's no accident, I think, that some of the most active collectors have been producers, movie producers, theatrical producers. There's a will toward making meaning. There's a will toward wanting to say something about one's time and place. That's all very, very interesting and very laudable. Sometimes it's just greed. They just love these things. They don't want to part with them. They don't want anyone else to have them. They just want them. That seems fine with me.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Painting, use this horrible expression, kicked around for a while. I was in some other flexion. It was shown in London a few times. And then finally ended up in a very good collection in New York. So this is the vagaries of commerce and taste. The paintings are subjected to it or somehow tied, intimately tied with.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The artist might be the last to know. There have been a few happy stories. The happy stories are usually a result of a personal relationship with a collector or with a curator, someone who has followed what you've been trying to do and has been sympathetic been trying to do and therefore is more attuned, their antenna is more attuned to when something is an opportunity. There was one painting, actually a painting that you were looking at in the book earlier this morning that was purchased by a very, very good collector on the West Coast and was a very good friend of mine, someone who's very generous of the museums and other artists. The collector opened his collection to a curator from MoMA, basically saying, take whatever you want. So we felt sure that Fyrida was going to take this painting, which we had all kind of agreed at the time, had reached that sort of level. Guess what? The curator didn't take that painting. Took a much lesser painting. We were baffled, but anyway, as the curator's choice, then the painting, let's say, the”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many delusions, self-delusions that are involved in being an artist, life of an artist, I think probably most of which are necessary, especially when you're a young artist, you have no right to think these things or feel these things or presume that any of these things, but sometimes you are encouraged by the people around you, dealers or collectors or other artists, that these delusions maybe are legitimate. I remember making a painting at the very early 80s. I just thought it was a winner. And my dealer at the time was basically just told or she thought they wanted to hear. So this is a pain we're reserving for museums. Museum only she'd been made a list of which museums would be likely no museum was interested in this painting. No major collector was interested in this painting. I can't remember what happened at the painting. The painting went to some collector, then it went to auction, then went to some other collector, went to another auction. I don't even know where it is today. I'd be happy not to know where it is. But this is a painting that at the time I thought, this is Museum Only.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too common paths to failure, then there are other paths of failure, which are truly embarrassing, which is I just wasn't paying enough attention. I thought that was the right blue, but it wasn't the right blue. And anyone paying attention would have known it wasn't the right blue. That sounds so mundane. That's probably more often the case.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That happens too. There are so many ways a painting can fail. Most of them disheartening. Probably the most disheartening is when the whole pictorial conception was wrong. I visualized this thing that was going to be so great. And it's not that I didn't execute it properly. I executed it properly and looked at it and realized concept was stupid or was insincere or was involved in some way with something which wasn't true and was a lapse in taste or was juvenile or something. That's not fun. The other thing that's not fun is maybe more honorable or less full of self-reproach, at least the way I work. Sometimes the picture is to reach a height depend on a gamble. I'm placing a bet and a wager that I put this thing next to that thing. Magic's going to happen. It's going to catch fire. And I just know it. I just know it. Sometimes it doesn't work. But at least I tried. I tried something. It didn't, okay, it didn't work. It didn't pay off. Get rid of it. Those are two.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More, as you say, just showing up the collection. We've all had been to those great museums in Europe, which are essentially repurposed industrial buildings. Very little in the way of amenities. You just have great stuff you look at. I'd like to see more of that.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Museums have gotten caught up in European museums as well in the last fifty years is the building boom, the architecture bonanza has been great for architects, where a museum has to claim kind of architectural singularity to get press, to get attendance, to get donors. So much of the attention of the money has gone into the making of the buildings. Some of them good, some of them not so good, many of them not so good, but many of them think fairly surprising degree are not necessarily hospitable places to look at art. It might be incredible examples of urban intervention or the building arts, but they're not necessarily places that are particularly congenial looking at paintings, maybe looking at other kinds of forms that could well be suited for that. I sometimes wish that less attention, sort of less money, went into the creation of vast buildings.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember a conversation with a Whitney trustee a long time ago, maybe 30 years ago. I can't remember what show we were talking about, talking about the slate had scheduled. And this guy said, oh, no, you have to understand. What we want is bodies through turnstiles. So, okay, that's what we want. Museums need a great deal of money to operate. Where does it come from? It doesn't come from the government. It comes from ticket sales and private individuals and corporations. It's neither good nor bad. It's just a fact of life. How to make it better? We were talking last night. There are so many regional museums that serve specific populations. And I agree with you. I think do such a great job of giving access to visual experience of various eras and various types. Anyone who just wanders in is going to get something out of it. I'm a great fan and believer of museum culture and museums in whatever city I'm in, forming the backbone of my travel experience. I'm sorry, what was the question? What's wrong with American museums?”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my experience, artists are both more patient and more impatient than the non artist in a museum setting. I am so impatient. I do not want to linger in front of things that don't interest me. I don't care who made them. I don't care what time period they were made in. I don't care the incredible backstory of how that thing ended up in the museum. Just couldn't. It just means less. I just want the visual hit that adrenaline rush of some visual piece of interior feeling knowledge insight. And without it, I'm gone. When I find it, I can stay in front of a painting for hours, long after people of sensibility, long since”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to paint at a certain scale. These pictures that we're looking at now, they're tall. Some of them are 10 feet tall, 10 feet square, making a painting that size just requires a certain kind of physical energy, kind of reach and stamina. It's very different from making a 30-inch chai portrait. It becomes naturally to me that kind of physical engagement with the canvas at a certain scale is something that I've always done. I've always had that sense of scale in my work. Other artists might have a completely different sense of scale. But regardless, painting is a physical activity and it requires concentration, obviously mental concentration, but also just physical stamina. It is, I've said this other places, it is one of the things in life that you can get better at with the age instead of worse, but you do reach a point where the physical body is a limitation, how many hours a day you can work, how big you can work.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You would have seen works where the outline itself was jettisoned, but that was the unifying principle of all of his work. I mean, Jasper is a really fascinating example and I think quite rare in that early Jasper is very different from work at the 70s, which is very different from the work of the 80s, 90s, et cetera, and yet it's unmistakable when you see a painting by him from whatever date, unmistakably his, but his concerns changed, his technique changed, his scale changed, certainly his subject matter changed. The very idea of having subject matter changed. So there's just quite a lot of movement. And if it's coherent and consistent and graspable as the expression of one personality, however diverse within that personality, it's very exhilarating experience to have. It's also a question of the curator. A curator has to make the roadmap, which one can follow.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very good question. You can almost divide artists into two categories, the ones who constantly evolve, constantly change, take on new challenges, even take on new identities, versus the ones who don't. And I don't think the ones who don't are lesser necessarily, or that they're less good when they're good, less profound when they're profound, less deeply pleasurable when you engage with their work. But they're definitely less rewarding as retrospective material. because the work is more all of a piece, or rather, I mean, everyone's work is all of a piece. All of a piece just in terms of its surface attributes. So yeah, psy having found his process, his way of picture making varied in that process less, say, than Jasper, certainly less than Roy. Even Roy clung to the black outline throughout his entire career and up until the very end, he had lived.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of it has attributed to that. I mean, for sure, I mean, this is in a way the most obvious thing of all, the artists we mentioned in the past were able to do what they did because we didn't have cameras, so they were required to document things in a way which is no longer required of artists or painters. But in general, we're in a mode, a mood, cultural moment, that favors the documentary as a meaningful expression of our time. That would certainly not have been the case in 1950 and 1940 or 1960.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's my answer was going to be. We're in a kind of documentary mode. And I'm sure the rise of photography, not just rise, let's say the deluge of photography.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that's true. It is a metavergency. But if you try to imagine being C ⁇ zanne, what was painting like immediately preceding C ⁇ zanne, if you look at C ⁇ zanne's early work, which basically answers the question, we don't know exactly what allowed C ⁇ zanne to break out of the dark doer brown, heavily outlined, agitated, congested paintings of his youth into the C ⁇ zanne that we all know that it didn't happen overnight. It was long, slow, and probably torturous process and something for which he was not immediately rewarded. So it is always the individual plus the cultural and the technological, you could say the technology of painting in his lifetime was X. He added Y to the X. And part of that is unnoval because the secret resides with him. It's interesting to think about what is it about the culture today that's producing the art today.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point. But I agree. We think that I think here's the point we think that art is like a menu in a Chinese restaurant for the artist. The artist's surveys the history of art and says I'll have one of those and one of those and one of those. I want to paint like Rembrandt in the morning and titan in the afternoon and then I want to paint like Giorgio O'Keefe before I go to bed. And it just, that's not the reality. The reality is you're kind of stuck with what your own body can do, your own attitude, your own level of coordination and control. It's more like athletics.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There really is only one Velasquez, there's really only one mane. There's only really only one whoever you think is really great. There's only really only one Puntormo. It's not that everybody in the 17th century or the 16th century was painting in a certain way. There were always these exemplars. And what allowed them to reach this other heights of the level is very mysterious and we're a whole other conversation. But this form of better word, the academic style of painting is something which is hard to do alone. It's part of a whole culture, a whole academy of looking, a whole way of looking and setting up the studio and having certain kind of assistants or kind of pigments and certain kind of tests of drawing and things that contributed to the look and feel of those paintings. I mean, one could do it. It would just take a tremendous effort of will. And then exactly would be the...”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I totally agree with your formulation, but people are going back. It's just not so easy. The first time I saw John Cohen's work, for example. To show the moment did, I think it was Little Hopkin did the show John and who else, maybe Elizabeth Payton, maybe even Lucy Scavish, I can't remember. There might have been three of them, Triple Whammy. First thing I thought when I saw John's painting is, oh, this guy owes nothing to modernism. He just doesn't care. It was my first awakening that there is a generation for whom it was really no big deal. John had started out his career making abstract paintings very credible, very likeable abstract paintings, but he clearly realized that he was the tail end of something and not the beginning of something. John's one of the few artists who had the talent, the skills, who took the time to acquire the skills to paint in a way which would have been out of the reach for many other people, we're just at the beginning of that next phase. There might be people painting like Velasquez the next decade. That's unlikely because the truth of it is there were very few people in the 17th century who painted like Veles.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was such a persuasive argument. It was such an inclusive and exciting and dynamic argument that what possibly could have been the reason to want to take a step back 200 years in history and paint like an earlier painter.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Artists are trained in such a vastly different way than in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even the 19th century. We just don't have the training. We're not trained in an apprentice guild situation where the apprenticeship starts very, very early in life, and the people who exhibit talent in drawing or painting are moved on to the next level. Today, painters are trained in professional art schools. People reach school at the normal age 18, 20, 22, something in grad school. And then they're in a big hurry. So if it's something you can't master or show proficiency in quickly, let's just drop it and move on. There are all the reasons as well, cultural reasons. For many years, for decades, painting in, let's say, the style of Alaska as it were even Salamanet would have been the reason for it. What would have been the motivating motivation for it, even assuming that one could do it? Modernism from whenever we date it, from...”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accident that they rise, and I don't think it's something which goes away. Now, it might, as I said earlier, it might simply be of less use to this generation than to that generation. But if you bother to look at what it actually is or how it was constituted, I think it can come to life again.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collectively, there are times when artists collectively move the needle forward in a way where it stays moved. Now, there are people who came, let's say people came right after that particular group, what's called the second generation abstract expressionists. Perhaps they didn't move the needle any further. Maybe the needle couldn't go any further in that particular direction. And those people now feel many of them were overrated in their time or have simply faded into another kind of level. But the people who really fuse baseline materials and make out of that fusion something which is both unique to that person and also addresses the broader aesthetic situation and also one step further opens the door for other people. Those people are rare. And when it happens, I don't think it's...”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm one of those people who has so deeply bought into the whole mythology of the abject expressions generation that I don't find them overrated. I find them fundamental and central. I find them foundational in 20th and 21st century painting. They're irreplaceable. And they are so for very specific reasons having to do with an unrepeatable historical set of events that produced in these particular people some response that was unprecedented and long-lasting and for me still reverberating probably not so for other people, younger people, although who knows?”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Wittgenstein dictum that for the meaning of something considered its use. I think things can have things, meaning art objects, art things, can have short-term use, they can have long-term use, they can have use that comes and goes, comes in and out of focus, they can be put to different uses in different times. All of that seems natural and fine to me, and I'm not sure that there's one long-term test which all great works of art would pass or that's something that's so durable that it doesn't change. And again, test of time according to whom? Who's judging who's the judge?”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An example I was fortunate enough to have been friends with him, had worked with him a number of times. Walter had his fearless view of what constituted 20th century art, and he was very comfortable communicating to people. But there had been few. And the way that curators are educated in the graduate schools and the way they're promoted in the museums doesn't exactly encourage that kind of risk-taking. And I'm not sure it would be rewarded in the art press if they did. But again, it's hypothetical.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the curator is, in a way, caught in the middle of this dilemma that they're hired because they're experts in something they've all done very diligent research and work and publishing in various areas in which they're expert. They want to share their expertise with the art viewing public. That expertise may not be in a particularly popular area. What are they meant to do? The shows in big museums, like the Museum of Modern Art, for example, are usually planned five years ahead at least, if not longer. The amount of logistical effort and the amount of money required to produce a major show to museum is daunting. So no one wants to make a mistake. That's not always a healthy situation to be in. As a profession, and again, I'm not in it, so I'm talking about it, looking at it from the outside, I could be wrong, profession that has encouraged or rewarded mavericks very much. There have been some Walter Hobbes.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of stories. In this country, the curator's answer to the director and the director answers to the board of directors. So there's a lot of oversight and there's a lot of people who have to be not pleased or mollified. It's not so controlling, but however, nobody wants to make an unpopular show or make a show which is controversial in the long way. Controversial in the right way might have been good a while ago, but now any controversy so quickly shifts over into being the unwelcome kind that it definitely has made people more risk averse. Beyond the obvious aversion to that kind of risk, there are as many different kinds of curators as there are different kinds of artists, obviously, and they have different intentions, different sensibilities. But this problem, which we first started talking about in terms of how criticism has changed, it all stems from trying to redefine the nature of the public art experience. What is the experience the public is meant to have with art and what is it that we're trying to encourage them to have?”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really interesting to even think about curators' work as being incentivized in the first place. I think that's a brilliant formulation.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Henry basically answers your question the following ways start collecting okay I don't have any money what how can I collect art we don't have to collect great paintings just go to the flea market and buy a vase for five bucks bring it back to your room live with it and look at it pretty soon you'll start to make distinctions about it and eventually if you're really paying attention to your own reactions you'll use it up and you'll give it to somebody else and you go back to the flea market and you buy another vase slightly better vase and you bring that home and live with that and so the process goes and that's very real it's very concrete”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the reading level, that's hard. I'll have to think about it. I'll have to come back with an answer in a few minutes. I'm not sure if there's anything concretely to do on the reading level. There probably is, it's just not coming to mind. Henry Geldzaler wrote a book very late in his life, at the end of his life. I can't remember the title. He addresses the problem of how something which is almost a taboo. How do you acquire taste, which is insensible we're talking about? It's something one can't even speak about it in polite society among art historians or art critics. Taste is considered to be something not worth discussing. It's simply we're all above that. Taste is in a sense something that has to do with hallmark greeting cards, but it's not true. Taste is what we have to work with. It's of human way of describing a human experience. Henry, who was the first curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was a wonderful guy and a wonderful rock.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the experience feels like, then we're stuck, then we have to manufacture all these other criteria, which may or may not be true. I mean, they might be true. They might in fact impact things in a meaningful way, but there's always the danger that those criteria take on a life of their own and they become a substitute for the experience rather than the actual experience. Now, that being said, the experience can and probably will change, but as long as one is alert to what that change is, that to me seems healthy and part of the process. I don't know if that does make any sense.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the visual art experience, where we know what we feel about something usually, but unlike meeting people when we meet art, we don't trust that feeling. So we have to then go to the wall label. And the wall label tells us X, and then we get confused because the wall label doesn't really describe what we think or feel about it. Maybe we think or feel nothing in particular. Maybe we think or feel boredom. But we're told the painting is, we work out as about X. And if we're good students, we kind of commit that to memory and repeat that, and pretty soon it becomes the thing that everybody says about that painting. It just simply may not align with anyone's actual experience. So the very simple piece of advice, if that's even the right word, simple procedure for people to simply ask themselves, what is it that you really find yourself thinking about when you're looking at something? And the answer to that might in fact be boredom or nothing or something unpleasant. And that's fine. There are plenty of other things to look at, just move on. I think without the ability to tell the truth about it.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I wrote my book. I took a page from another artist critic named Fairfield Porter, Fairfield Porter, was a painter who lived in Southampton, made very high-level paintings in a realist, a French realist tradition, landscapes to life, whatnot. It was also a very serious critic, a serious reviewer and critic. And Fairfield wrote one of his essays that Madame paraphrasing that one's immediate reaction to work of art are not dissimilar to the way one reacts to meeting a new person. That is to say, when you meet somebody when you know within a millisecond whether that person is likely for you or not, you of course can be wrong and you can change your opinion. But we form first opinions, first impressions when we meet people, and that's part of life, part of the discourse of life. What Fairfield was making was an analogy between that experience which we all have.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expanded enormously. And with that, there was also a need for interlocutors and interpreters, people who could explain the art to the audience. It was a growth industry for a while, not so much anymore. A lot of people tried their hand at what in the past might have been very, very select group of people who had some intimate connection with the people they were writing about. Increasingly, art writing just resembled journalism, as I say, its reporting on this person's having a show here and this person's themes are X and this person comes from this culture as a catalogue of either identity markers or subject matter markers or in other words which club that artist belongs to clubs. It's all fine, good, and then probably necessary, but it's not criticism and it's not thoughtful. Maybe it has a deleterious effect on the art experience itself if we can use that term sense of grandiose to say it like that.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, there's so many parts of the answer where to begin. Part of what happened in art writing, part of what happened in digital arts in America anyway, but also I think probably all over the West and maybe even all over the world, is the expansion of the audience. At a certain point, artists decided not that anyone got together and voted, but sort of collectively as a result of living through a certain time, artists thought, wouldn't it be nice not to be put in the art ghetto, be kept in the art ghetto any longer, but to enter into the broader culture, have more of a dialogue with the other arts, other more popular arts, more even entertainment? We don't want to be kept below 10th Street anymore. And they got their wish. I don't think anyone quite realized that achieving that was going to come at a cost. And the cost was a dumbing down, a simplification, whether it's over or not. I don't know, debate. Audience greatly expanded the kind of awareness of the visual arts in the general hub.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source