David Salle: prediction

Transcript context

…But if you think modernism is now exhausted, which is a plausible view at least, and you need to go somewhere, and you can’t get any more abstract . . . but still people don’t go back pretty much at all. No, I totally agree with your formulation. But people are going back. It’s just not so easy. The first time I saw John Currin’s work, for example, there was a show that MoMA did. I think Laura Hoptman did the show of John and who else? Maybe Elizabeth Peyton, maybe even Lisa Yuskavitch. I can’t remember, there might have been three of them, a 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 likable abstract paintings, but he clearly realized that he was the tail end of something, not the beginning of something. John’s one of the few artists who had the talent, the skills — took the time to acquire the skills — to paint in a way which would have been out of reach for many other people. We’re just at the beginning of that next phase. There might be people painting like Velásquez in the next decade. It’s unlikely because the truth of it is that there were very few people in 17th century that painted like Velásquez. There really is only one Velásquez, there’s really only one Manet, there’s really only one whoever you think is really great. There’s really only one Pontormo. 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 height, this other level is very mysterious and probably a whole other conversation. For want of a 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 a certain kind of assistants, a certain kind of pigments, a certain kind of tests of drawing, and things that contributed to the look and feel of those paintings. One could do it. It would just take a tremendous effort of will, and then, what exactly would be the point? I think here’s the point: We think that art is like a menu in a Chinese restaurant for the artist. The artist 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 like Titian in the afternoon. Then I want to paint like Georgia O’Keeffe before I go to bed.” That’s not the reality. The reality is you’re stuck with what your own body can do, your own aptitude, your own level of coordination and control. It’s more like athletics, more like you can’t — But athletes just seem to get better with time. I tend to think there’s something about urgency. To be Cézanne or Velásquez, there was something you had to feel was extremely urgent. And it’s simply impossible, today, to feel those same things as being urgent because they’re either taken care of or they’re irrelevant or they’re not part of your society or politics, and other things feel urgent.…

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