David Salle: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s not like my hand slipped or I fell off the ladder. It may happen sometimes, but — Yes, 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 the 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, but may be more honorable or less full of self-reproach, at least the way I work — sometimes pictures, to reach a height, depend on a gamble. I’m placing a bet and wager that if 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, but sometimes it doesn’t work, but at least I tried. I tried something. Okay, it didn’t work, didn’t pay off. Get rid of it. Those are two common paths to failure. There are other paths to 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. Anyone paying attention would have known it wasn’t the right blue. That sounds so mundane, but that’s probably more often the case. If you could, for us, please trace through the history of two of your paintings that could be imaginary, so to speak, ideal types. One is a very good painting that did very well and helped your reputation a lot, and the other is a so-so or below-average David Salle painting. Just trace, like, who buys them or where they end up. Give us the two hypothetical paths on how they differ. A really good painting — how does that go well for you?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.