hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm honored to be sitting here with david sally in david's studio out on long island david i would describe really as a force of nature he has spent most of his life creating art often as a painter but not only also sculpture film he directed a movie produced by martin scorsese david is perhaps best known for his rise to fame
in the 1980s where he heralded the revival of a certain style of figurative painting david is someone who is thought of as being able to work in in ballet in theater in virtually every genre and being able to integrate disparate elements of the artistic craft figure out how they work he has also written a highly regarded book of artistic criticism called how to see is working
on a memoir has three shows coming up this fall and you can think of david as someone who has done virtually everything he has in fact also interviewed scarlett johansson david welcome thank you very much tyler very happy to be here let me start with a few quotations from you and i'll read them off and you tell me what you meant okay here's the first one quote it sounds
strident but i feel my whole career represents my stand against or an alternative to literal mindedness i think it's kind of true what does it mean it's certainly nothing particular to me or rather not only to me however i feel that from starting from when i don't know from the 50s or the 60s or 70s at a certain point the experience of culture whether it's painting or
something else shifted the nature of the experience shifted to something that had more in common with journalism than with um then with what we might have called in a quote-unquote aesthetic experience that works of art were thought to be about something and what that about well as there is is something that could be more or less easily grasped and the it's the aboutness which
for me is almost a kind of short circuiting of the of the art experience so when i say what i'm what i'm opposed to is or find myself in opposition to is literal mindedness what i mean is just that do let's not be so literal let's not take it so everything so literally is there to be no metaphor is there to be no invention it's what i meant to that statement nomic gnomic that might sound
is essentially let's have more fun and let's use more imagination here's another quotation from you quote well a good work of art does about 15 things simultaneously when it hangs on the wall i think people might underestimate the the decorative function of painting painting is has various functions a good painting satisfies most of them or all of them pretty much at a high level
one of the functions historically is to make the room look better to make people's emotional temperature quicken slightly when when the painting's in the room as opposed to when it's not in the room that's a decorative function but it's an important one i remember the first time i met jasper johns he actually said to a friend of mine who was standing with us that
the first obligation of a painting is to make the wall look better than it's hanging on it is one of those statements that is so simple-minded provokes mystification but it's just a simple fact what else does painting do obviously we wanted to do more than just be decorative i think any good painting i mean really good painting expresses something true about the time
in which it was made and about the maker but that's another level and doesn't have to be apparent in the same way that its decorative value is apparent what else does it do it locates the maker and in a certain history certain dialogues and discourse it um it sometimes takes sides it sometimes provokes arguments so these are other things the paintings can do maybe 15 is a slight exaggeration
here's another quote it's easier to write about money than to write about art and i write about money well i don't mean to imply tyler that writing about money is simple but it's easier than your job i'm sure it's quite difficult to do it well it's difficult there's a the obvious problem in writing about art art is visual language is language it's when we write about literature or
sociology or something other than music the medium with which we used to describe it is somehow aligned with the experience of it in the first place and with a painting or a sculpture when i say painting i mean visual arts generally there is always an approximation or translation that is challenging to do it well is challenging so what is wrong what has gone wrong
with art criticism today and what is your structural model for how and why that happened now there's so many parts of the answer 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 kind of collectively as as a 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 any longer be kept in the arc any longer but to be enter into the broader culture have more of a dialogue with other other the other arts or the more popular arts more even entertainment
we don't want to be kept below 10th street anymore and they got their wish no one i don't think anyone quite realized that to achieving that was going to come at a cost and the cost was a dumbing down um simplification whether it's over or not i don't know it's a matter of debate the audience greatly expanded the the kind of awareness of the visual arts and the general public
expanded enormously and with that there was a there was also a need for interlocutors and interpreters people who could explain the art to the audience so the the uh it was a growth industry for a while not so much anymore a lot of people were tried their hand but in the past might have been very very select group of people who were had some intimate connection with the people they
were writing about increasingly art writing just resembled journalism 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 there's a catalog of either identity markers or subject matter markers or in other words which club that artist belongs to clubs it's all fine good and probably necessary but it's not
criticism and it's not thoughtful and it may maybe it has a deleterious effect on the art experience itself if we can use that term sense of grandiose to say it like that but so if i want to learn how to read better to 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
i when i wrote my book i took a page from another artist critic named fairfield porter jeff reporter was a painter who lived in southampton uh made very high level paintings in a realist french realist tradition landscapes to life what not was also a very serious critic a serious reviewer and critic and fairfield wrote one of his essays that um and i'm paraphrasing that
one's immediate reaction to to a work of art or not dissimilar to the way one reacts to meeting a new person that is to say when you meet somebody when you know within a millisecond whether that person is likely for you or not you course can be wrong and you can change your opinion but we we form first opinions first impressions we meet people and that's part of part
of life part of the the discourse of life so what fairfield was doing was making was an analogy between that experience which we all have every day or most days and the visual art experience where we know what we feel about something usually but we don't but unlike meeting people when we meet art we don't trust that feeling so we have to then go to the wall label and 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 maybe we think or feel nothing in particular maybe we think or feel boredom but we're told it's the painting is the work of what is about x and if we're good students we kind of commit that to memory and repeat that and it be pretty soon it becomes the
thing that everybody says about that painting it just simply may not be may not align with anyone's actual experience so the this very simple piece of advice if that's even the right word simple procedure is for people to simply ask themselves what is it that you really find yourself thinking about when you're looking at something and the answer to that might in fact be boredom or nothing or
something unpleasant and that's fine and there are plenty of other things to look at just move on i think without the ability to tell the truth about it what the experience feels like then we're stuck then we have to manufacture all these other criteria which may or may not be true i mean they might be true they might in fact impact things in a meaningful way but
there's always the danger that those criteria are taken a life of their own and they become a substitute for the experience rather than the actual experience now that being said the experience can and probably will change but as long as one is alert to what that change is that to me seems healthy and part of the process and it does make any sense yes but just to be very concrete let's
say someone asks you i want to take one actionable step tomorrow to learn more about art and they're a smart highly educated person but have not spent much time in the art world what should they actually do other than look at art on their reading level on the reading level oh god tyler that's hard i'll have to have to think about it i have to come back with an answer in a
few minutes i'm not sure if there's anything concretely to do on the reading level there i mean it probably is just not coming to mind there's henry geldzahler wrote a book very late in his life at the end of his life i can't remember the title but he addresses the problem of how something which is almost a taboo how do you acquire taste right which is in sense what we're talking
about yeah it's it's something one can't even speak about it in public society or among art historians or critics taste is considered to be something not worth discussing it's it's simply we're all above that we don't we have a taste is in a sense something has to do with hallmark greeting cards but it's not true taste is what we have to work with it's of human
it's a way of describing a human experience henry who was the first curator of modern and contemporary art at the metropolitan museum in new york was a wonderful guy and a wonderful rock on tour henry basically answers your question the following ways start collecting okay i don't have any money what how can i collect all right we don't have to collect great paintings but just go to
the flea market and buy a voz for for 5.5 bucks bring it back to your room live with it and look at it pretty soon you'll start to make distinctions about it and eventually if you're really paying attention to your own reactions you'll use it up and you'll go and you'll give it that to somebody else and you go back to the flea market and you buy another vaz
slightly better of oz and you bring that home and live with that and so the process goes and that's very real it's very concrete what is wrong with the incentives of museum curators the incentives the incentives so there's a structural problem there which you can identify for us as you see fit and where does that problem come from it's really interesting to even think about
curator's work as being incentivized in the first place i think that's a brilliant formulation but they might be too risk-averse too conformist there's a lot of stories you could tell well the in this country the curator's answer to the director and the director answers to the board of directors so there's a lot of oversight and there's a lot of people who have to be not pleased or mollified they're not
they're not it's not um it's not so controlling but 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 un un welcome kind that it's um definitely has made people 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's a this problem which we first started talking about in terms of how criticism has changed it all stems from the trying from trying to redefine the nature of the public
art experience what is the 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 um so the curators in a way caught in the middle of the of this this dilemma that they're they're hired because they're experts in something they've all done very diligent research and work and publishing in in various areas that they're in which
they're expert they want to share their expertise with with the art viewing public that expertise may not be in a particularly popular area so what are they what are they meant to do uh the shows in big museums like the music of modern heart 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 the ninja museum is is daunting so no one wants to make a mistake that's uh you know not always a healthy situation to be in the is a profession and i'm again i'm not in it so i'm talking about it looking at from the outside i could be wrong a profession that has encouraged or rewarded mavericks very much there have been some walter hobbs with one example i was
fortunate enough to have been friends with him had worked with him a number of times walter has the fearless view of what 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 if they did but again it's hypothetical 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 i it actually reminds me of the
wittgenstein dictum not not that we're playing competing philosophers here but the victims the victims are victims for the meaning of something consider its use i think things can have things meaning art objects art things can have short-term use they can have long-term use they can have use that comes and goes comes in and out of focus it can be different that can be put to different
uses and different times all of that seems natural and fine to me and i'm not sure that there's one long-term test which all great works of art would would pass or that's something that's so durable that it doesn't change there's and again test of time according to whom you know who who's judging who's the judge my but say angelica kaufman who was much
heralded in her lifetime in the 18th century is now considered a good painter but somewhat of a curiosity important for her role in getting women into the arts but not a great painter anymore that would be one example i mean should our default be to trust no i don't think so i think one should make one's own judgment and it might differ greatly from from accepted uh opinion
if you look say at the abstract expressionists and their reputations and what they did what would be an example where you think the test of time is wrong so you've pollock you've climbed you've mother well right they all have reputations where has the test of time messed up there i mean which one's overrated or which one's underrated in your view yeah i'm one of those people who has so
deeply bought into the whole mythology of the abject expressionist generation that i don't find them overrated i find them i find them fundamental and central and found i thought i find them foundational in 20 20th and 21st century painting that they're irreplaceable and and they are so for very specific reasons having to do with an unrepeatable historical set of events
that produced in these particular people some response that was unprecedented and long-lasting and for me still still reverberating probably not so for other people younger people although who knows collectively there are times when i really started again there are times when artists collectively move the needle forward in a way where it stays moved now there are people who came let's say
people came right after that particular group what's called the second generation abstract expressionists i mean perhaps they didn't move the needle any further maybe the needle couldn't go any further in that direction that particular direction and those people we now feel many of them were overrated in their time or have simply you know faded into another kind of
you know another kind of level but the people who really to fuse um kind of baseline materials and make out of that fusion something which is both personal unique to that person and also addresses the the broader aesthetic situation and also one step further opens the door for other people those people are rare and when it happens i don't think it's an accident that they rise and i don't think it's
something which goes away now it might as i said earlier it might simply be of less use to this generation than to that generation but if you bother to look at what it actually is or how it was constituted i think it can come to life again as you know the 17th century in european painting is a quite special time you have velazquez your reuben you struggle much much more
and there's so many talented painters today why can they not paint in that style anymore or can they what stops them artists are trained in such a vastly different way than in the 17th 18th or even even the 19th century we just don't have the training we don't we're not trained in an apprentice guild situation where the apprenticeship starts very very early in life
and the people who exhibit talent and drawing or painting are are moved on to the next level today painters are trained in professional art schools people reach school at the normal age 18 20 22 or something in grad school and then they're in a big hurry so if it's something you can't master or show proficiency proficiency in quickly let's just drop it and move on
there are other reasons as well cultural reasons for many years for decades painting and let's say the style of velasquez or even the cell of manet what would have been the reason for it what would have been the motivating motivation for it let's even assume that one could do it moderatism from whenever we dated from 1900 to 1990 was such a persuasive argument it was such a
inclusive and exciting and dynamic argument that what possibly could have been the reason to want to take a step back 200 years in history and paint like an earlier painter but if you think modernism is now exhausted which is a plausible view at least and you need to go somewhere and you can't get any more abstract but still people don't go back very much if not no i mean i totally
agree with with your with your formulation but people are going back it's just not so easy the first time i saw john curran's work for example right there was a show that moma did i think it was laura hopping to the show of john and who else maybe elizabeth payton maybe even at least you scavenge like i remember there might have been three of them a triple whammy and first
thing i thought when i saw john's painting oh this guy owes nothing to modernism he just doesn't care it was my first awakening that there is a generation for whom it was really no big deal john had started out his career making abstract paintings and very credible very likable abstract paintings but he clearly realized that he was the tail end of something like the beginning of
something but john's one of the few artists who had the talent the skills and who took the time to acquire the skills to paint in a way which would have been out of the reach for for many other people we're just at the beginning of that next phase there might be people paying like velasquez the next decade that's unlikely because the truth is there were very few people in the 17th
century kind of like molesters there really is only one velasquez there's really only one manet there's only really only one whoever you think is really great there's only really one puntormo it's not that everybody in in the 17th century you know or the 16th century was painting in a certain way there were there were always these exemplars and what allowed them to reach this
other heights of the level is is very mysterious and powerful the conversation but this the form of a better word the academic style of painting is something which is hard to do alone it's part of a whole culture a whole academy of looking a whole way of looking and setting up the studio and having a certain kind of assistance or kind of pigments and certain kind of
tests of drawing and things that contributed to the look and feel of those paintings i mean one could do it it would just take a tremendous effort of will and then what exactly would be the point but i agree there's it's i mean we think that i think here's the point we think that art is like a menu in a chinese restaurant for the artist the artist says survey is the history of
art and says i'll have one of those and one of those one of those i want to paint like rembrandt in the morning and like petition in the afternoon and then i want to paint like george o'keeffe for the you know if you know it before i go to bed and it just isn't that's not the reality the reality is you're kind of stuck with what your own body can do your own aptitude your level of
of coordination and control it's more like athletics kind of more like you can't but athletes just seem to get better with time i tend to think there's something about urgency so to be you know cezanne or velazquez there was something you had to feel was extremely urgent and it's simply impossible today to feel those same things as being urgent because they're either taken care of or
they're irrelevant or they're not part of your society or politics and other things feel urgent yeah and i think that's true it is a matter of urgency it's also a matter of what but if you try to imagine being saizon he's who what was painting like in immediately preceding cezanne if you look at ceylon's early work which basically basically answered the question
i mean we don't know exactly what allowed cezanne to break out of the dark dewer brown heavily outlined agitated congested paintings of his youth into the saizon that we all know that it didn't happen overnight it was a long slow and probably torturous process and not and something for which he was not immediately rewarded so it is always the individual plus the cultural and the
the technological you could say that the technology of painting in his lifetime was x and he added to he added y to the x and part of that is unknowable i mean it's because the secret resides with him sorry but it's interesting to think about what is what is it about the culture today that's producing the art today i think that's the question is it that's what you're asking yes
so the rise of photography would be one of many examples right i think that's my answer was going to be we're in a kind of documentary mode and i'm sure the writers of photography they've not just arise let's say the the deluge of photography and the centrality of it centrality of it has contributed to that i mean for sure i mean this is the in a way that most obvious thing of all the artists we
mentioned in the past were able to do with what they did because we didn't have cameras so they were required to document things in a way which is no longer required of artists of painters but in general we're in a we're in a a mode a mood a cultural moment that favors the documentary as a meaningful expression of our time that would certainly not have been the case in 1950 or 1940 or 1960.
now if i think of some painters when i see their works all together in the form of a major retrospective i enjoy them more and they make more sense to me so rory lichtenstein or jasper jones would be examples there were other great painters slight wombly i saw a big retrospective of his work i didn't like it less but when i walked out of it i didn't feel especially enriched
you may disagree on who belongs to what category but what differentiates the artists who do much better when you see a retrospective of all their work together what's the extra thing you're learning or gaining it's a very good question you can almost divide artists into two categories the ones who constantly evolve constantly change take on new challenges even take on new
[Music] almost like new new identities versus the ones who don't and i don't think the ones who don't are lesser necessarily or that they're less good when they're good less profound when they're profound less deeply pleasurable when you engage with their work but they're definitely less rewarding as retrospective material because the work is is more all of the piece or rather i
mean everyone's work is all the piece but all of the piece just in terms of its surface attributes so yeah psy having found his process his way of picture making varied in that process less say than jasper certainly less less than roy and roy even roy clung to the black outline throughout his entire career and up until the very end and if he had lived longer he would have
we would have seen works where the outline itself was jettisoned but that was the unifying principle of all of his work i mean jasper is a really fascinating example but i think quite rare in that early jasper was very different from work of the 70s which is very different look at the 80s and 90s etcetera and yet there's unmistakable when you see a painting by him from whatever
date it's unmistakably his but his concerns changed his technique changed his scale changed his certainly his subject matter changed his the very idea of having subject matter changed so there's just quite a lot of movement and if it's coherent and consistent and graspable as the expression of one personality however diverse within that personality it's a very
exhilarating experience to have but it's also the question of the curator a curator has to make the road map which you know one couldn't follow now we're sitting here in your studio surrounded by your paintings you're a relatively prolific painter always working what are the biggest just purely physical problems you encounter being a painter i like to paint at a certain scale
these pictures that we're looking at now they're tall some of them are 10 feet tall 10 feet square making a painting that size just requires a certain kind of physical energy from kind of reach and stamina it's very different from making a 30 inch high portrait it's it becomes natural to me that kind of physical engagement with the canvas at a certain scale it's something that i've always
done i've 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 it requires concentration obviously mental concentration but also just physical stamina it is i think i've said this other places it is one of the things in life that you can get better at with the agents that are
worse but you do reach a point where the the physical body is a limitation just how many hours a day you can work how big you can work when you walk through a museum as an artist how is it you do that differently you mean differently from someone who's not an artist right but someone who has some background in looking at the visual arts right in my experience artists are both
more patient and more impatient than the non-artist in in a museum setting i am so impatient i do not want to linger in front of things that don't interest me i don't care who made them i don't care what time fear they're made in i don't care the incredible back story of how that thing ended up in the museum just couldn't interest me less i just want the visual hit
of that adrenaline rush of some visual piece of interior feeling knowledge insight and without it i'm gone when i find it i can stay in front of painting for hours long after people of sensibility would look long since i've moved on what do you think is the biggest thing wrong with leading american museums today i remember a conversation with a whitney trustee a long time ago maybe 30 years
ago i can't remember every show we were talking about talking about the slate the head schedule and this guy said oh no you have to understand what we want is bodies through turnstiles so okay that's what we want we need museums need a great deal of money to operate where does it come from doesn't come from the government comes from ticket sales and private individuals and
corporations it's not it's neither good nor bad it's just a fact of life how to make it better we were talking last night there are so many regional museums that serve specific populations that that and i'd agree with you i think do such a great job of giving access to visual experience of various eras and various types to people if you just anyone who just wanders in
he's going to it's going to get something out of it i'm a great fan and believer of museum culture and museums in whatever city i'm in forming the the the backbone of my travel experience i'm sorry what was the question what's wrong with american music what's wrong with them you know looking at them as an economist i see they put out maybe five or ten percent of their collections or
sometimes even less and that at least on the surface appears inefficient i understand why they hoard an endowment it's a signal to donors that they'll be reliable that they won't sell the painting to somewhere where it has a lesser value but it still seems to me that's wrong it has to be wrong yeah to lock up so much wonderful interesting output more or less forever yeah right i mean
the thing that all museums have gotten caught up in in european museums as well in the last 50 years is the the building boom the architecture bonanza has been great for architects where a museum has to claim kind of architectural singularity to get press to get attendants to get donors i who have so much of the attention the money has gone into the the making of
the buildings some of them good some are not so good many of them not so good but many of them but i think fairly surprising degree are not necessarily hospitable places to look at art they might be incredible examples of urban intervention or the building arts but they're not not necessarily places that are particularly inconvenient looking at certainly
looking at paintings maybe looking at other kinds of art other forms are could they could well be suited for that i sometimes wish that less attention and certainly less money went into the creation of vast buildings and more [Music] to just as you say just showing off the collection when you all had you've been to those great museums in europe which are essentially repurposed industrial
buildings right with very little in the way of amenities just have great stuff you look at i'd like to see more of that when you make a bad painting what is your best account of what it is that has gone wrong in you that's a great question it's not like my hand slipped right i fell off the ladder it may happen sometimes but yeah that happens too there are so many ways a painting can
fail most of them disheartening probably the most disheartening is when the whole pictorial conception was wrong i visualized this thing that was going to be so great it's not that i didn't execute it properly i executed it properly and looked at it and realized the concept was stupid or was was insincere or was you know in involved in some way with a something
which wasn't true and was a lapse in taste or was juvenile or something that's not fun the other thing that's not fun is but maybe more honorable or less you know less full of software approach is at least the way i work sometimes the pictures to reach a height depend on a gamble i'm placing a bet in a wager that i put this thing next to that thing magic's going to happen it's going to catch fire
and i just know it i just know it sometimes it doesn't work but at least i tried i tried something it didn't okay it didn't work didn't pay off get rid of it those are those are two common paths to failure then there are other paths effect which which are truly embarrassing which is i just wasn't paying enough attention i thought that was the right blue but it
wasn't the right blue and anyone paying attention would have known it wasn't the right blue but is that that sounds so mundane but that's probably more often the case if you could for us please trace through the history of two of your paintings that could be imaginary so to speak ideal types one is a very good painting that did very well and helped your reputation a lot and the
other is a so-so or below average david sally painting just trace like who buys them or where they end up give us the two hypothetical paths and how they differ they're really good painting you mean how does that go how they well for you how they differ in terms of their their their his journey this gun buys it david geffen buys it and 16 years later it's donated to moma
like that would be a happy story right so tell us the happy story you don't have to name names and then tell us the less happy story hmm it's hard to do without naming names but a prominent collector of high renown would be fine yeah there are so many delusions self-delusions that are involved in being an artist life of an artist i think probably most of which are necessary
especially when you're a young artist you have no right to think these things and feel these things or presume any of these things but sometimes you're encouraged by the people around you dealers or collectors or other artists that you know these delusions or maybe are are legitimate i remember making a painting in the very early 80s that i just thought it was a winner and my dealer at the time
was basically just told dogs whatever they she thought they wanted to hear so this is a pain with we're reserving for a museum this is now in in artists parliament was museum only and she even made a list of which museums would be likely well no museum was interested in this painting no major collector was in this painting i can't remember what happened to the
painting the painting went to some collector then it went to auction then went to some other collector it went to another auction i don't even know where it is today i'd be happy not to know where it is but this is a painting that at the time i thought this is museum only the artist might be the last to know there have been some a few happy stories it's and the story the happy stories are
usually a result of a personal relationship with with a collector or with a curator who have someone who has followed what you've been trying to do and has been sympathetic we've been trying to do and therefore is more attuned their antenna is more attuned to when something is an opportunity there was one painting actually a painting that you were looking at in the book
earlier this morning that um was was uh purchased by a very very good collector on the west coast and was a very good friend of mine and made someone who's very generous with other museums and with other artists the collector uh opened his collection to a curator from moma basically saying take whatever you want so we felt sure that peter was going to take this painting which we had all kind
of agreed at the time was you know had this had reached that sort of level but guess what the curator didn't take that painting took a much lesser painting we were baffled but anyway the creator's choice then the painting the let's say the a painting would use this horrible expression you know kicked around for a while it was in some other collection it was
shown in london a few times and then finally ended up in a very good collection in new york so this is the uh the vagaries of commerce and taste that the paintings are subjected to and are somehow you know tied intimately tied with tied up with uh if you think of the really great collectors herbert and dorothy fogel the meyerhoff see like road opinions may differ but what is it to
you that they have in common as a class um i'm not sure until i can think of what they have in common that they seem to me and that i would probably you know add a bunch of other names it's hard to generalize about them quite honestly they seem so different one from another i guess you could say that motivations are similar they're you know for some reason this work
speaks to them and they have arranged their lives in such a way as to be to a certain extent to find themselves defined by this body of work that they've that they've created that they've they've collected they've created the work they've created the context for the work it's it's a kind of transference the kind of kind of predo producerial arrangement i mean it's not it's no
accident i think that some of the most active collectors have been uh producers movie producers or theatrical producers there's a there's a will toward making meaning there's a will toward wanting to say something about one's time and place that's all very very interesting and very laudable sometimes it's just greed they just they love these things they don't want to
part with them they don't want anyone else to have them they want to you know they want i just want them that also doesn't that seems fine with me but most of the really great ones i mean the active ones sooner or later maybe just for practical considerations i have wanted to share that collection with the public which is certainly that's the kind of american system that we've we've evolved
and how are artists different as collectors you have a collection of your own right i do find artists collect from more from informational and informational standpoint the artist has owes nothing to the art world vis-a-vis their collection the artist isn't making a statement about the world in their collection or is the artist judged by their collection the collection is a
really private matter it's like it's more like a library so i mean i know for example that my friend jeff coons collects corbei paintings which i would too if i could afford them i think that's great he doesn't collect art like his own he looks very very different from his own i collect things that are very different from what i what i make and i don't actually live with my work
in the house the the way in which an artist uses another artist's work is sometimes very eccentric and hard to hard to trace or hard to see at first i think artist collections have more to do with being wanting to be reminded about something wanting to be nudged by something wanting to have something as a touchstone sometimes it has a spiritual component of a buddhist scholar rock or
something of the sort sometimes it's something relatively insignificant um but it's but it's a reminder or a a link to a whole nother world another experience why is it that frank o'hara has been so important to both you and alex katz and alex painted frank as you probably know right frank was important to alex for a number of reasons one probably the most important reason is
that alex is a great consumer of and connoisseur of poetry generally in new york school poetry in particular and they were contemporaries and friends so it's inconceivable that alex wouldn't have been interested in or close to frank o'hara unfortunately i didn't get to meet frank o'hara but i discovered his poetry when i was a kid it spoke to me for whatever reason it's
actually it's very easy as poetry goes to grasp and he continues to epitomize something about that time and place the late 40s to the mid 60s late 60s which still remains a touchstone and also still full of mystery and full of sensibility it's it's let's say it's the it's the roots it's where one finds the roots of a certain sensibility which for me is still very much alive maybe not
for anybody else he is the certain kind of painter's poet par you know park salons he is the poet of nouns vote of things the poet of appearances and the poet of connections between things i mean in a way he's the perfect poet it's a list of names but it's more than a list of names it's a it's a what happened at the party but it's also about mortality it's a body
it's about beauty it's also about degradation it's it's and it's very accessible and very musical oh i don't think it's an accident i think many many painters here which is your favorite preston sturgis movie and why they're all so great i think the one i've seen the most doesn't mean i think it's necessarily the greatest but one i've seen the most is the lady eve i've seen it at least 20 times
it's i still laugh it still cracks me up the i kind of think of sturgis all five of the great films as one film it's actually one super long film which just keeps playing in my head the hail the conquering hero is certainly the most complex and in a way almost painful i mean psychologically painful and at the time it was made it was quite radical though
most viewers may not have seen that yeah yeah so it's a great film it's a great achievement the crowd scenes the the image of the town i mean i love sturgis depiction of a town the life of a town his other films are centered on much smaller social groups so in a way he was it was his frank capra film yeah maybe sullivan's travels is the most delicious i don't know they're all
that's my favorite selling trouble flex narrative of what art should be for which can be read in a number of different directions yeah there's a there's an obscure early one called the sin of harold dittelbach you know that one no i don't with uh with harold lloyd it's weird film a guy who works in a bank who's never had a drink in his life he finally gets laid off at the bank takes
the money his his uh severance pay goes to a bar for the first time in his life and then we see him the next morning having purchased a circus which he brings home he's living with his sister anyway crazy preston sturridge's plot you know sergius is his friend just fabulous he's something i think about a lot why do you find the tv show the sopranos so interesting
very much like the way i think about painting when i think about art in general but the sopranos shows is someone who took the conventions of the day of gangsters mafia cops and made out of it something which hadn't existed this psychological realism that had a texture almost granular texture of life as it's lived so that people who have been have no i mean most of us have no encounters
with the mafia really we all imagined that we were part of the mafia and we all imagined we all projected ourselves into these families and social groups in which this mafia behavior was completely normal uh normalized that david chase made out of this convention something so psychologically dense so much about the family the the damage that families do to one another
the constraints of society versus the individual the stifling of imagination that he managed to make a lot of this crime drama metaphors for almost every dilemma in american society from the the inability of the individual to to be different to be survived i mean all these issues which now think of was commonplace that he could locate them inside of a weekly drama about crime family
still seems to me to be miraculous and also a model for what art should can do or how it should think of itself that it's the 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 i am somewhat vague myself on what it even says now there were there have been some
cases i'm not not sure how they were settled or to what extent their landmarks but i i do feel in terms of visual culture i mean i've spent a good part of my career appropriating things that other people did you could say it's just wrong it's theft and that would be you know certainly a position that would be hard to argue with my position is very different that
everything that exists exists in the present tense and that everything can be material for someone else without violating its original status and it one thing doesn't impinge on the other and it doesn't need to be protected because if it's any good it protects itself that's my view i don't know what the law says in my view it's too hard to appropriate images whether in painting or in rap music
or the difference between who can have the rights to a painting the rights of the photograph just seems too complicated i think there should be more open access to close i'd like to offer three different statements from you as we started and you can tell us what you meant by each one here's one and i quote one of the principal cultural alliances is between the avant-garde
and sexual libertainism unquote i wish it were true it seems as though the avant-garde is no more um no no more uh protected from puritanism puritanicalism than in the other segment of society um so i think i was wrong on that one it was wishful thinking here's another one from you quote it may surprise you but my work is full of love well the second part is true
the surprise part obviously is you know depends on who you ask and what day i wonder and i don't know if it would be possible to make a survey or who would give you an honest answer but i wonder if every artist or rather how many artists feel that the use to which their work has been put in public and the fact that it's been put to any use at all is already a huge
privilege and something that you know i'm grateful for and i think everyone is grateful for however if if i'm trying to rephrase it if the gap between the way one's work has been perceived and the way one perceives it oneself how big is that gap and why is this why is it so big is it is the fact that it's a gap it's a failure on the part of the artist quite possibly that's certainly one way to read it
is it simply a matter of more time is necessary i like to think that's the answer but i could be wrong over time the acid in the paintings gets dialed down or actually just leaks out and what's left is it's i don't know if it's it's opposite is exactly right but something very different let's put this way tyler making a painting like as you just said even even appropriating something is a
lot of work making a painting's a lot of work making painting that it hangs together holds together the elements all together the colors are in the right intervals and the all the formal elements work and the subject matter elements work it's a hell of a lot of work to go to all that trouble just to be a smart ass it's just it's kind of not worth it you
have to have a little bit bigger game in mind so i think you know anything anyone makes a painting on any level is trying to communicate something fairly complex and fairly in involved with you know for a better word human emotions and that the the the again the language that was returns us to our original question the language that we use talk about these things these things are
cool these things are hot i'm just not sure any of that stuff you know means anything and the last question is the hypothetical one you posed to your former teacher john baldessari and i quote which is better for an artist to be loved or feared um well i think to be loved is much better but i i i know i've known artists who would choose the other option david sally thank you very much thank you tyler