David Salle: evaluation

Transcript context

…They might be too risk-averse, too conformist. There are a lot of stories you can tell. Sure. In this country, the curators answer to the director, and the director answers to the board of directors. There’s a lot of oversight and a lot of people who have to be — not pleased or mollified; it’s not so controlling. However, nobody wants to make an unpopular show or make a show which is controversial in the wrong 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 it 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 there is 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? The curator’s, in a way, caught in the middle of this dilemma that they’re hired because they’re experts in something. They all have done very diligent research and work in 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, so 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 in a major museum is daunting. No one wants to make a mistake. That’s not always a healthy situation to be in. It is 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 — it’s not a profession that has encouraged or rewarded mavericks very much. There have been some. Walter Hobbs was one example. I was fortunate enough to have been friends with him and worked with him a number of times. Walter has a fearless view of what constituted 20th-century art, and he was very comfortable communicating to people. But there have 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. I feel like I’m getting away from the question. No, that’s a good answer. Philosopher David Hume had suggested that the closest we could come to a final standard of aesthetic quality was some notion of the test of time — what survives and is appreciated by future generations. Do you agree? And if not, why not?…

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