David Salle: belief

Transcript context

…Why do you find the TV show The Sopranos so interesting? Very much like the way I think about painting, the way I think about art in general, but The Sopranos show is someone who took the conventions of the day of gangsters, mafia, cops, and made out of it something which hadn’t existed, just psychological realism that had a texture, an almost granular texture of life as it’s lived so that people who have no . . . Most of us have no encounters with the mafia, really. We all imagined that we were part of the mafia, and 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. He managed to make out of this crime drama metaphors for almost every dilemma in American society, from the inability of the individual to be different, to survive. All these issues which we now think of as commonplace — that you could locate them inside of a weekly drama about a crime family still seems to me to have been miraculous, and also a model for what art can do or how it should think of itself, that it’s the engagement with certain givens, and then who the hell knows where it’s going to go after that. How should we change intellectual property law for artists?…

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