David Salle: evaluation

Transcript context

…What has gone wrong with art criticism today? What is your structural model for how and why that happened? There are so many parts of the answer, I’m not sure where to begin. Part of what happened in art writing and part of what happened in the visual arts — in America anyway but also, I think, probably all over the West, and maybe even all over the world — is the expansion of the audience. At a certain point, artists decided — not that anyone got together and voted, but collectively — as a result of living through a certain time, artists thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice not to be put in the art ghetto any longer, be kept in the art ghetto any longer, but to enter into the broader culture, have more of a dialogue with the other arts or the more popular arts or even entertainment. We don’t want to be kept below 10th Street anymore.” And they got their wish. I don’t think anyone quite realized that achieving that was going to come at a cost, and the cost was a dumbing down and simplification — whether it’s over or not, I don’t know — it’s a matter of debate. The audience greatly expanded. The awareness of the visual arts in the general public expanded enormously. With that, there was also a need for interlocutors and interpreters, people who could explain the art to the audience. It was a growth industry for a while, not so much anymore. A lot of people tried their hand at what, in the past, might have been a very, very select group of people who had some intimate connection with the people they were writing about. Increasingly, art writing just resembled journalism; that is to say, it’s reporting on this person having a show here, and this person’s themes are X, and this person comes from this culture — just a catalog of either identity markers or subject-matter markers. In other words, which clubs that artist belongs to. It’s all fine, good, and probably necessary, but it’s not criticism, and it’s not thoughtful. Maybe it has a deleterious effect on the art experience itself, if we can use that term — sounds grandiose, to say it like that. If I want to learn how to read better, to learn about art and read about art, and if there’s something wrong with art criticism today, what is it that I best should do? Your own book aside, of course.…

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