David Salle: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let me start with a few quotations from you. I’ll read them off, and you tell me what you meant. Here’s the first one. “It sounds strident, but I feel my whole career represents my stand against — or an alternative to — literal-mindedness.” I think it’s true. What does it mean? It’s certainly nothing particular to me, or rather, not only to me. However, I feel that starting from when? I don’t know, from the ’50s or the ’60s or ’70s — at a certain point, the experience of culture — whether it’s painting or something else — the nature of the experience shifted to something that had more in common with journalism than with what we might call “an aesthetic experience,” that works of art were thought to be about something. What that “about” was, or is, is something that could be more or less easily grasped. It’s the aboutness which, for me, is a short-circuiting of the art experience. When I say what I’m opposed to — or find myself in opposition to — is literal-mindedness, what I mean is just that. Let’s not be so literal. Let’s not take everything so literally. Is there to be no metaphor? Is there to be no invention? What I meant in that statement—gnomic though it might sound — is essentially, let’s have more fun, and let’s use more imagination. Here’s another quotation from you. “Well, a good work of art does about 15 things simultaneously when it hangs on the wall.”…

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