Painting as a Physical Activity

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I like to paint at a certain scale. These pictures they were looking at now, they're tall. Some of them are ten feet tall, ten feet square. Making a painting that size just requires a certain kind of physical energyind of reach and stamina. It's very different from making a 30 inch high portrait. Ive always had that sense of scale in my work. Other arts might have a completely different sense of scale. But regardless, painting is a physical activity and requires concentration, obvos, mental concentration, but also physical stamina. You do reach a point where the physical body is a limitation,. how many hours a day you can work, how big you can work.

When the audience for visual art expanded from small circles of artists and collectors into broader culture, the way art was experienced shifted from aesthetics to explanation. Art, it became thought, should be about something. But David Salle rebukes this literal-mindedness: according to him, what we think and feel when reacting to a piece of art is more authoritative than what’s written on the label next to it. A painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, David is also the author of How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, a highly regarded book on artistic criticism.

David joined Tyler to discuss the fifteen (or so) functions of good art, why it’s easier to write about money than art, what’s gone wrong with art criticism today, how to cultivate good taste, the reasons museum curators tend to be risk-averse, the effect of modern artistic training on contemporary art, the evolution of Cézanne, how the centrality of photography is changing fine art, what makes some artists’ retrospectives more compelling than others, the physical challenges of painting on a large scale, how artists view museums differently, how a painting goes wrong, where his paintings end up, what great collectors have in common, how artists collect art differently, why Frank O’Hara was so important to Alex Katz and himself, what he loves about the films of Preston Sturges, why The Sopranos is a model of artistic expression, how we should change intellectual property law for artists, the disappointing puritanism of the avant-garde, and more.

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Recorded August 18th, 2021 Other ways to connect

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