What Is It That Makes You Lick?

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When i wrote my book, i took a page from another artist critic named fairfield porter. He said that one's immediate reactions to work of art are not dissimilar to the way one reacts to meeting a new person. We know what we feel about something, usually, but unlike meeting people, when we meet art, we don't trust that feeling. So we have to then go to the wall label an the wall label tells us x. And then we get confused, because the wall label doesn't really describe what we think or feel about it. Mayb think or feel r nothing in particular. But we're told the painting is work of hat its about x. It just

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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