The partnership is in its third consecutive year and represents part of the fourth iteration of The Armory Show’s public artworks project, Armory Off-Site.

“We’re thrilled to again partner with the US Open to showcase artworks by artists of underrepresented backgrounds. Both The Armory Show and the US Open are defining parts of New York’s fall calendar, and this partnership comes during an exciting cultural moment for New York City,” Kyla McMillan, director of The Armory Show told ARTnews via email. “Through our partnership, we hope to reach new and familiar audiences by providing an opportunity to discover artists and artworks, perhaps even forming a lasting connection with the fair.”

The projects on view during the US Open include the installation Tetl Mirror I (2024) by Claudia Peña Salinas, presented by Embajada, which explores Aztec and Mayan mythology; Eva Robarts’ sculpture, Fantasy of Happiness (2022), which uses discarded tennis balls caught within the chain-link of a reclaimed gate and is presented by the gallery Ruttkowski;68; Taiwanese-Canadian sculptor An Te Liu’s bronze-casted Venus Redux (2018), presented by Blouin Division; and Tomokazu Matsuyama’s Runner (2021), presented by Kavi Gupta.

The works will be on view throughout the tournament, from August 19 to September 8. As part of US Open Fan Week, access to Billie Jean King National Tennis Center is free from August 19 through August 25.

The Armory Off Site program includes performances across New York City. The artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s recent work Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity (2024) is comprised of visits to seven historically significant New York City communities, from Harlem Art Park to Madison Square Park, with poetry readings at each site and a workshops and performances at the end of the route. 

Oliver Herring will present 20-minute performance that serves as an homage to “queer icons whose creative forces and visionary careers were tragically and prematurely interrupted” on the Bowery, and a new work by David Salle with grace Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment program.

This year The Armory Show will celebrate its 30th anniversary. More than 235 galleries are expected to participate in the fair, scheduled to run from September 6–8, with a VIP preview day on September 5, at the Javits Center in Manhattan.

Salle, dressed in a blue chore coat and matching denim pants, surveyed the works around the gallery, most of which were on the floor, leaning against the wall. His hands were straight down by his side, as if he were standing at attention, his fingers were tap dancing against his pants. Hill, who stood next to him in a navy-blue suit nearly the same color as Salle’s outfit, watched the artist watching the room.

It was just a few days before “Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained,” an exhibition curated by Salle and culled from the Hill Art Foundation’s collection and the personal collection of Hill and his wife Janine.

“It’s like the candy store has been opened up,” Salle said.

“Well, I know David’s work going back to the 80s—and you know, I’ve read everything he’s written,” said Hill. “Anybody who thinks about art knows his book, How to See.”

Salle continued Hill’s thought: “We were all pandemic-ing in East Hampton, and I got an email from a mutual friend Lawrence Luhring who said, ‘I have a couple I think you should meet.’ I said, ‘Well, we are all here doing nothing.’”

Their initial meeting, Hill said, was “a really lovely afternoon. David’s set-up out there is wonderful. It’s just a few minutes from our house.” 

“By the end, he said, ‘Maybe you’d like to do something for the foundation,’” Salle recalled. ” It was so nice, so natural.”

Salle is a painter who’s long been interested what he once called “concrete visual perception”—an emphasis on seeing over theory as the key to understanding art. (He even wrote a book called How to See.) His new show for the Hill Art Foundation makes that line of thinking manifest, since it implodes art-historical lineages and boundaries.

The show’s 37 works span multiple mediums and art-historical eras, and are organized non-chronologically. “One of the animating ideas was that if art has any kind of communicative value to the present tense, you should be able to move back in time, which is not how it’s presented in museums curatorially—they’re things are bracketed by time. We are freed from that constraint. We don’t have to make sense. We just have to make beauty.”

Indeed, the show is beautiful. Connections that wouldn’t inherently jump out at you emerge. Francis Bacon’s moody Study for Figure II (1953) sits across the room from the raucous, scrawl of an untitled work from 2001 by Christopher Wool. A pencil and charcoal version of Pablo Picasso’s Femme aux Mains Jointes (1938) sits wonderfully next to Amy Sillman’s 2023 canvas Untitled (blue, black). In each pairing the works compliment each other, though there are no immediate formal similarities. Shapes with the Picasso and the Sillman echo one another. The bright red lines of Christopher Wools picture plays a strong counterpoint to the streaks of brownish grey paint that make up Bacon’s study.

Works by Francesco Clemente, Robert Colescott, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Callum Innes, Karen Kilimnik, Doron Langberg, Brice Marden, and Henri Matisse are also included. Nothing about the show’s hang is set in stone, however. Just days before the private opening, paintings were swapped out. When asked about the reason for the last-minute changes, Salle said, “I don’t want to go into detail about things that were substituted—there’s no magic reason or formula, the point simply is that it is all intuitive and felt rather than predetermined.”

The private opening was attended by names almost as well-known as those that decorated the gallery walls. Curators like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s David Breslin and MoMA’s Ann Temkin, as well as New Museum director Lisa Phillips and market rainmaker Amy Cappellazzo were in attendance. The Guggenheim, where Tom Hill is board chair, was also well-represented, with outgoing director Richard Armstrong and curator Katherine Brinson also on hand. Artists in the show came by to see what Salle had up: Christopher Wool, Nicole Wittenberg, and Cecily Brown.

If Salle’s purpose was to help viewers find a new way to look at art they’ve seen, an original way to appreciate beautiful things, then the show is a success.

Walking around the room guests could be heard saying “I never would have thought to put that there” and “imagine if this was over there next to the Salman Toor, would it work?” The organization of the works was captivating enough to make visitors actively look at the art. With the help of Tom Hill, Salle was showing us another way to see.

Salle will be represented by Gladstone in the US; Lehmann Maupin and Thaddaeus Ropac will continue to represent him in Asia and Europe, respectively. Yet the Gladstone move will mark a departure from Skarstedt, the blue-chip enterprise that has mounted seven solo shows by Salle in the past decade.

In an email to ARTnews, dealer Per Skarstedt said, “It has been a pleasure to work with David Salle these past ten years. Gladstone and David will be a good fit. Skarstedt will continue to be involved in the secondary market.”

His defection to Gladstone comes after that gallery staged a show of his work in Brussels last year. A New York exhibition with Gladstone will follow in the fall of next year.

In a statement, dealer Barbara Gladstone said, “We are delighted to formally welcome David to the gallery. I have always admired his work, both as a visual artist and as a writer. His unquestionable skill, wit, inquisitiveness, and psychological depth have helped distinguish him as one of the most unique and compelling painters of his generation. One of my very first coveted art acquisitions was a painting by David that I bought in 1979, a year before I opened my eponymous gallery on 57th Street, so I am very grateful to have this opportunity to work together.”

Salle has frequently been grouped in with the Pictures Generation, a group of artists, many of whom were based in New York, that used appropriation in his work during the late ’70s and early ’80s. For his well-known canvases from that era, Salle layered seemingly unlike images in ways that can variously recall Francis Picabia’s “Transparencies” and James Rosenquist’s Pop paintings.

“Salle’s canvases are like bad parodies of the Freudian unconscious,” critic Janet Malcolm famously remarked. “They are full of images that don’t belong together: a woman taking off her clothes, the Spanish Armada, a kitschy fabric design, an eye.”

Initially, these paintings polarized critics, some of whom labeled Salle’s repeated images of nude women misogynistic. Since then, his paintings have found a loyal following.

In addition to his artistic practice, Salle has written prolifically on painting, with some of his essays appearing in ARTnews.

Salle said in a statement, “Barbara Gladstone and I have been friends for decades and Gladstone has long been a bastion of independence and integrity. I’m very pleased to join the company of many artists I admire most.”

Those artists include Carroll Dunham, Arthur Jafa, Joan Jonas, Alex Katz, Wangechi Mutu, Richard Prince, and Rosemarie Trockel. Gladstone’s roster has expanded rapidly since 2020, when dealer Gavin Brown was brought on as a partner.

“We wanted to do something that would give artists a great opportunity to enter into this world,” said Jennifer Stockman, a cofounder and former president of the Guggenheim Museum’s board of trustees. “But not by just focusing on the artist but the production and exhibition of this work and bringing in museums, institutions, and collectors.”

Looking to help artists in more traditional media (like painting and sculpture) pivot to digital, DMINTI reached out to painter David Salle. His new NFT work A Well-Leafed Tree (2021) launched the agency on Sunday after it was minted on the NFT platform SuperRare.

A Well-Leafed Tree is an animation based on Salle’s paintings inspired by Peter Arno’s New Yorker cartoons from the 1930s and ’40s. Though the animation doesn’t exactly capture the painterly quality Salle suffuses into his art, it could be a hit on the NFT market nevertheless.

DMINTI’s approach is to tailor their NFTs to an artists’s existing work, helping participants tap into a wild market. Carola Jain, DMINTI’s CEO and another cofounder, said, “We meet with them, we take a look at their body of work, consult with experts and try to understand where the opportunity lies for an NFT or a different Web3 experience, and then we help the artists produce that work.”

In Salle’s case, he’s always wanted to do an animation. Why not execute that and turn it into an NFT? In a promotional video, Salle adds, “The ability to make things move is a bonus–paintings don’t move.”

Other artists the company plans to work with include Sarah Meyohas, Oscar Murillo, and Sarah Morris, and former Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector has been brought on board to help expand DMINTI’s pool of artists. “Between her knowledge of artists and my own knowledge as a collector and our respective teams, we are reaching out to many wonderful top artists,” Stockman said.

Like other burgeoning NFT companies, buzzwords like accessibility and democracy are also part of DMINTI’s game plan. Jain said, “This whole shift into a different art world is really about democratizing art and making it accessible to many more people around the world.”

Installation view of “Ai Weiwei,” 2012, at Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MARY BOONE GALLERY

Last month, ARTnews reported that Mary Boone Gallery, one of New York’s most celebrated art spaces, will shutter, following its eponymous founder’s sentencing to 30 months in prison for falsifying her tax returns. Looking back on the gallery’s decorated 42-year history, we’ve collected a list of some of Mary Boone Gallery’s most important shows, along with excerpts from reviews by ARTnews critics of the exhibitions. Reflections on shows by Ross Bleckner, Barbara Kruger, David Salle, and many more follow below.

David Salle
March 6, 1982–March 31, 1982

The show: Having been introduced to Mary Boone by artist Ross Bleckner, David Salle was given his first solo show at the gallery in 1981. A second solo exhibition—held alongside another one at Leo Castelli Gallery—followed the next year. On view were some of his signature paintings, crafted by meshing together appropriated imagery from mass media and art history, which Salle placed on equal footing.

What ARTnews said: “Rather than make icons out of these bits and pieces, appropriated from art’s recent past and from culture more broadly, Salle equalizes them through a deliberately non-committal treatment. His images, dispersed without regard for a coherent sense of space or scale, discourage narrative interpretation. Although he is generous with visual information, Salle’s disjointed imagery adds up to little more than deep-seated skepticism about the assignation and value of meanings in contemporary culture, particularly as they formulated in art. That he chooses to express this loss of faith in such visually seductive terms, however, undermines his message of disavowal.” —Deborah C. Phillips

Mary Boone.

GREGORY PACE/BEI/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Francesco Clemente
April 2, 1983–April 30, 1983

The show: The first Francesco Clemente outing at Mary Boone Gallery was complemented by another solo show by the artist that ran simultaneously in New York at Sperone Westwater. At Boone, the artist, who was then based in Italy and India, debuted new paintings, which offered surrealist narratives shot through with eroticism. It was Clemente’s first New York solo show, and it effectively launched him to stardom in the U.S.

What ARTnews said: “At Mary Boone, a series of large panels, each measuring 78 by 93 inches, was located high up on two long facing walls. While intended to facilitate viewing, the installation also brought out the monumental qualities in these paintings. The featured motif in the paintings, which are untitled, is an iconic face, varying in type from masklike to painfully human. Among the unforgettable images were one of a man in which every orifice is filled with another face apparently trying to escape, and one of a woman from whose tears two other figures are created. The strong emotional impact of these paintings is enhanced by their intense colors and textured surfaces, elements that were equally important in two standing screens in the show.” —Ronny Cohen

Jean-Michel Basquiat
May 5, 1984–May 26, 1984

The show: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first exhibition with Mary Boone is one of the most storied exhibitions in the gallery’s history. Having already shown with Gagosian Gallery, Annina Nosei Gallery, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, and Marlborough Gallery, Basquiat had already become well-known, and his Boone show only helped build excitement around his career. Works on view there have ended up in notable collections—Deaf (1984), for example, is now held by the Broad museum in Los Angeles.

What ARTnews said: “Basquiat insists on imposing his vocabulary of signs and squiggles, but then he makes them either very easy to understand or superfluous. His paintings are offhand, disorderly and random, mixing rough and smooth, drawn and barely drawn, to create an impression of facility and ease. The painter clearly tries not try, going slack instead of slick. Ultimately, though, the bright surface supplants an internal glow, toys replace people, a big smile substitutes for happiness.” —Eric Jay

Parker Posey (foreground) playing Mary Boone in the 1996 film Basquiat.

ELEVENTH STREET PROD/MIRAMAX/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Sigmar Polke
January 5, 1985–January 26, 1985

The show: The first Sigmar Polke show at Mary Boone featured nine large canvases, each of them blending together kitschy imagery and abstractions. Critics at the time drew connections between then-emerging artists on Boone’s roster and Polke, who had already become famous as one of the foremost Pop artists hailing from Europe.

What ARTnews said: “Immediately recognizable as a significant influence on such artists as David Salle and Julian Schnabel, Polke’s work incorporates kitschy fabrics as painting grounds, gestures and techniques derived from Abstract Expressionism and banal, ‘styleless’ line drawings of media-generated imagery. . . . Polke’s paintings give rise to issues central to the postmodernist dilemma: how to fulfill high art’s demand for a unique vision of the world without relying on style, the traditional vehicle for individual expression; and how to articulate contemporary experience when the formal language of modernism seems inadequate and the figurative styles of the past smack of cultural regression.” —Nancy Grimes

Eric Fischl
March 1, 1986–March 29, 1986

The show: Alongside a Whitney Museum solo show featuring nearly 30 canvases, Eric Fischl debuted new paintings at Boone in 1986. The works included in this show tackled psychosexual tensions underlying quaint suburban scenes, in manners that recall the brushy portraits of Édouard Manet.

What ARTnews said: “These concurrent shows offered an opportunity to assess Fischl’s achievement as debunker of the American dream. They clearly indicated that he is an artist of major stature and that he has begun to take his stature very seriously. In this latter regard, the new work at Mary Boone suggests a change of direction. Only one of the four paintings (Saigon, Minnesota, which seems, in fact, to be located in California) contains the familiar sun-drenched backyard inhabited by nude suburbanites at play. The other three paintings are more involved with art history than contemporary life, as if Fischl now feels the need to match himself against the great masters.” —Eleanor Heartney

Sherrie Levine
September 12, 1987–October 10, 1987

The show: Having made Clemente, Salle, Basquiat, and other male painters into art-market phenoms, Boone added her first two female artists to her gallery’s roster in the mid-’80s—Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger. Levine, who had been known at the time mainly for appropriating works by male modernists as a way of questioning authorship, had her first show at the gallery in 1987. At that show, she debuted new paintings and photographs that stripped Russian Constructivist of the originality with which it had once been imbued.

What ARTnews said: “In the untitled ‘Lead Checks’ series, for example, the exalted grid and the machine-tooled object of Minimalism stage a comeback as arty checkerboards. Like the patented formal moves of the Minimalists, however, Levine’s abstract paintings, by dint of repetition and formal poverty, function as trademarks for the artist rather than as fully autonomous works. In a way, the reduction of art to signature makes perfect sense for an artist who began her career signing the image of others.” —Nancy Grimes

Installation view of “Barbara Kruger 1978,” 2018, at Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MARY BOONE GALLERY

Barbara Kruger
January 7, 1989–January 28, 1989

The show: Kruger had her first show at the gallery in 1987, just months before Levine. Her second outing featured some of Kruger’s most famous works, which combined slickly shot imagery related to desire, along with sans-serif text that pointed toward something darker. They appeared to be advertisements for a nonexistent product, and some critics took issue with what they perceived as the glibness of the works on view. Today, however, many of these pieces have been canonized.

What ARTnews said: “Apparently it is enough to wave vaguely in the direction of feminist and left-wing political theory and hope the viewer has read the correct books. In the past, Kruger’s sly criticisms were often rigorous and insightful. Now, because they promise a profundity they never deliver, the works come even closer to the advertisements they mimic.” —Nancy Grimes

Dan Flavin
March 2, 1991–March 31, 1991

The show: Mary Boone Gallery hosted a few shows of art that wasn’t contemporary—or not immediately contemporary, at least—and one such exhibition was this presentation of eight works from Dan Flavin’s “ ‘monument’ to V. Tatlin” series (1967–70). Composed of fluorescent lighting tubes, the works pay homage to Russian Constructivism, in the process offering a statement about the relationship between art and industry. Critics of the era noted the museum-like quality of the exhibition.

What ARTnews said: “ ‘Coolness’ is the word Flavin himself has used to describe the Tatlin series, yet by selecting such similar work for this exhibition he turned coolness into something as formal as a funeral. Then again, perhaps that was his intention. Tatlin’s original monument was a paean to the Third International at the start of the great Russian experiment, before the excesses of Stalin. Today, however, in the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union’s economic and political systems, Flavin’s project becomes as much a eulogy as a homage.” —Frances DeVuono

Tim Rollins (left) and Mary Boone (right) at a party for Rollins’s exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1995.

STEVE EICHNER/PENSKE MEDIA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Tim Rollins + K.O.S.
May 2, 1992–June 27, 1992

The show: By the time Tim Rollins + K.O.S., a collective of students from New York’s South Bronx neighborhood who produced art with Rollins, had their first show with Mary Boone Gallery in 1992, they had become famous for producing paintings that reinterpret literary classics. Their Boone show focused on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and the tale of Pinocchio, the latter of which was represented via an installation featuring 50 logs strewn around the gallery.

What ARTnews said: “Suddenly, the classic children’s story [of Pinocchio] takes on new dimensions. The wood and the doll’s eyes allude to the puppet who wished to be a real boy. But there is much more: a sense of being scared, unformed, lost, or hiding, as well as a feeling of adventure and discovery. Tim Rollins + K.O.S. have created an artwork that transcends its literary source to say something about the nature of youth and the experience of going through life—in a way that is surprising and moving, and quite funny.” —Ruth Bass

Ross Bleckner
November 11, 1998–December 19, 1998

The show: Ross Bleckner has been one of the mainstays at Boone’s gallery, having had some 16 solo shows there. One of the first artists to show with the dealer, Bleckner became known during the ’80s for his abstract paintings, which some critics later in the decade noted shared similarities with images of cells under the stress of AIDS. His 1998 show at the gallery, which coincided with another exhibition of his at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York, was viewed as a departure from this style.

What ARTnews said: “While in earlier work his symbolism frequently dealt with issues surrounding death and dying and has been associated with the AIDS epidemic, his subject matter seemed to hint at an afterlife. Now his concerns are literal, visceral: disease under a microscope. Some of the paintings at Boone were clusters of sickly grayish green cells festering with red, raspberry-like malignancies. Others resembled strands of DNA, chromosomes, floating molecules, and microorganisms.” —Carol Diehl

Marc Quinn
January 10, 2004–February 28, 2004

The show: Having risen to fame as a member of the Young British Artists group during the 1990s, Marc Quinn had his first show at Mary Boone Gallery in 2004. Included were ten marble sculptures that revised Neoclassical traditions for contemporary times, depicting such subjects as the Olympic swimmer Peter Hull through centuries-old means.

What ARTnews said: “The sculptures had a sterile beauty, a cold seductiveness. And the craftmanship was impeccable. It was done, after all, by master artisans, based on Quinn’s casts of the models. But the show’s conceptual underpinnings—works of such perfection made from models whose bodies are imperfect—came off as overly clever and even preachy.” —Sarah Douglas

Installation view of “Marc Quinn,” 2004, at Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MARY BOONE GALLERY

James Lee Byars
April 28, 2006–June, 24, 2006 (Chelsea); May 18, 2006–June 24, 2006 (Uptown)

The show: In 2006, both of Boone’s galleries turned over their space to work by the late artist James Lee Byars, whose work was also being featured simultaneously in New York at Perry Rubenstein and Michael Werner. On display were a number of Byars’s sculptures, which evoked mystical phenomena through minimalist forms.

What ARTnews said: “At Mary Boone uptown, The Soft Sphere (1989), a simple Thassos marble orb, was fit for a temple. Byars seized on ritual and ceremony as ordering principles in an increasingly secular world. But in his yearning for both luxury and simplicity he seems in line with today’s baby boomers: eager to embrace the virtues of plainness gleaned from an earlier time but firmly attached to the finery afforded by modernization.” —Carly Berwick

Ai Weiwei
January 7, 2012–February 4, 2012

The show: Sunflower Seeds, one of Ai Weiwei’s most famous pieces, made its New York premiere at this exhibition. (It had debuted at Tate Modern in London, where it was shown in the museum’s cavernous Turbine Hall.) At Mary Boone Gallery, Ai showed one million sunflower seeds—each of them hand painted by an artisan in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, which is known for producing porcelain—that were neatly arranged into a squarish form on the space’s floor.

What ARTnews said: “Sunflower Seeds, at Mary Boone, was the exciting reprise of a much larger work presented last year at Tate Modern. There, 150 tons of ceramic kernels filled the museum’s massive Turbine Hall. It was an amazing meditation on the power of the individual versus mass society: Each seed was created by a master artisan in China. Yet together, they combined into a vast gray landscape. In New York, this smaller version retained the work’s magnetic power. Five tons of seeds, installed in a 16-by-32-foot rectangle in the center of the gallery, allowed visitors to circumnavigate and contemplate it. While a bit reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy spills, Ai Weiwei’s piece requires audiences to resist the temptation to touch or take the seeds.” —Barbara Pollack

David Salle, After Michelangelo, The Creation, 2005–2006.

©DAVID SALLE/VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/PARRISH ART MUSEUM, WATER MILL, NEW YORK, GIFT OF TINA BILOTTI

For three paintings he made more than 10 years ago, David Salle stared down some daunting subject matter: Michelangelo’s masterpiece for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

That was the source of what Salle called the “wacko idea” for a commission presented to him by collector Carlo Bilotti, and it’s all there in three works from 2005–06 that came about as a result: After Michelangelo, The Creation; After Michelangelo, The Flood; and After Michelangelo, The Last Judgment. Never before shown in the United States, they were recently donated to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, where they will soon go on view.

“Who could possibly engage with the Sistine Chapel? It’s the height of hubristic folly,” Salle said of Bilotti’s notion for new paintings to make. “I did it for him—he was such a believer in it as something that could be engaged in a contemporary way. I did it out of his belief.”

Two years before he died, Bilotti—“a loquacious retired Italian-American perfume executive from Palm Beach, Florida,” as he was once described in the International Herald Tribune—enlisted Salle to make the three works to show alongside commissions by two other artists (Damien Hirst and Jenny Saville) in his new Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome. And there they appeared as part of an inaugural exhibition in 2006 that featured new works interspersed with others from Bilotti’s collection, including canvases by Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning as well as 22 works by Giorgio de Chirico. “I know the Museum of Modern Art would have taken these 22 wonderful de Chiricos and given me a room, or I suppose I could have given my collection to a museum here in Florida,” Bilotti told the Tribune at the time. “But let’s face it, Boca Raton isn’t Rome!”

Recalling the commission a decade later in his studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Salle said he expressed some trepidation when it was first broached. “I said, ‘Carlo, that doesn’t sound very promising to me.’ He said, ‘Well, I had originally intended it for Andy.’ ”

Given that Warhol was dead, Salle took it on. “I said yes because for me it was an opportunity to learn about the Sistine Chapel, which I had seen but hadn’t really thought about much. Saying yes to Carlo was a way of saying, ‘I’ll learn something about the Renaissance.’ ”

He learned about scripture, too. “Not being a student of biblical literature, putting it mildly, I didn’t know the stories or symbology,” Salle said. “I kind of started from scratch. But my interest in it was formal.”

David Salle, After Michelangelo, The Flood, 2005–2006.

©DAVID SALLE/VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/PARRISH ART MUSEUM, WATER MILL, NEW YORK, GIFT OF TINA BILOTTI

Into the divine imagery of Michelangelo’s masterwork painted more than 400 years ago Salle incorporated references to contemporary events, such as visions of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in After Michelangelo, The Flood and modern industrial and mechanical inventions in After Michelangelo, The Creation. “In the way that I work—not in every case, but often—there’s a background, almost like a given,” Salle said. “Sometimes the given is derived from one of my photographs or from something else, a tapestry or some other backdrop, a layer in the painting to which everything else responds. In that sense it wasn’t different from things I’ve made all along.”

The methodology dates back to earlier in his career, he said. “I did so much work for the theater making backdrops, which were always meant to be seen with dancers in front of them—the painted part was the background and the dancers were the foreground. So the Michelangelo parts were the backdrops, and the other parts are the ballet.”

David Salle, After Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, 2005–2006.

©DAVID SALLE/VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/PARRISH ART MUSEUM, WATER MILL, NEW YORK, GIFT OF TINA BILOTTI

The context is more freighted than usual, though, given its grounding in the creation of the cosmos and the fragile balance that keeps the universe afloat. “If one is going to engage with it all, it seems to me that everyone has to think about the implications of the story,” Salle said. “I don’t usually talk about subject matter in this way, but maybe now it is warranted. You start thinking about the flood, and it’s not even a jump to start thinking about the world that we live in. You don’t have to think theologically to find it relevant.”

And not just relevant but timely, given the increasingly intense realization that long-looming climate crisis has arrived. “The conditions haven’t changed—peoples’ awareness has changed,” Salle said when asked if the valence of his imagery has shifted since he made the paintings more than a decade ago. “We’ve all known, for a good 20 years, that disaster is just around the corner.”

But hopefully art can serve as a salve, both for the artist and the audience that will get to see his Sistine Chapel paintings on Long Island thanks to their donation to the Parrish by Margaret S. Bilotti, the widow of Carlo (who died in 2006). The works will be included in “Every Picture Tells a Story,” an exhibition of the museum’s permanent collection that opens November 11 and runs for nearly a year.

When asked if his Sistine Chapel paintings hold a special place in his heart when thinking about his oeuvre, Salle struck an even tone. “I don’t think of my work that way,” he said. “It’s all of a piece to me. I made them; I’m making something else now.” But then: “I’m happy to see them again.”

Despite having secured a place in the canon, Morley remains something of an enigmatic cult figure. He was highly regarded throughout his career—especially by his artist peers—for his skill as a painter and his boundless ambitions for the medium. In some sense, the Turner Prize winner strove to be a painter of history. Yet his images of the arcane past also address autobiographical themes surrounding his troubled youth as well as the tumultuous cultural conflicts of the time when they were made.

The London-born artist, who moved to New York in 1958, frequently challenged audiences with seemingly abrupt shifts in style, technique, and imagery. For those up to the challenge, however, the work was always intellectually sound and visually thrilling. Morley approached each new painting as if engaged in a serious battle to be waged and won. Full of wit and acerbic humor, Morley could be surprisingly self-deprecating. During the times we met, in his Bellport studio and in New York for dinner or gallery visits, he always brightened the conversation with puns, jokes, and humorous asides. Despite struggling with illness, he continued to paint until a few weeks before his death on June 1, just six days before his eighty-seventh birthday.

“Malcolm Morley: Tally-ho,” a concise and refined survey of Morley’s work with an emphasis on his last canvases, is on view at Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York through October 27. The show includes the artist’s final painting, St. George Fleeing a Prairie Meadow Burning (2018). As noted by scholar Tim Barringer in the exhibition’s catalogue, this striking image features the patron saint of England in armor on horseback. He charges through a Western American landscape in flames, a scene inspired by a nineteenth-century work by George Catlin, best known for his portraits of Native Americans. Other major late works here include the mural-size Melee at Agincourt (2017), showing heavy cavalry in full armor and with lances; the colorful regalia creates a mesmerizing optical effect against a searing yellow background. Also on view is Cristoforo Colombo (1966), a painting of an ocean liner representative of Morley’s Superrealist works. And The Ultimate Anxiety (1978), an expansive composition featuring a freight train incongruously crashing through the air into a seventeenth-century Venetian regatta scene, is a major example of one of his early Neo-expressionist works.

A public memorial for Morley will be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 21 at 3 PM. (RSVP is required. Write to rsvp@speronewestwater.com). A number of his art-world peers sent remembrances to the Brooklyn Rail. Others shared their thoughts with me. Artist and writer Walter Robinson, who knew Morley, offered this statement about his life and work:

“Malcolm Morley was a tough-guy painter, who famously turned to art in prison as a kind of rehabilitation. Adopting the most rudimentary of methods, Morley squared off postcard images and laboriously reproduced them on canvas by rote, thus inventing his own art movement, Photorealism. That he painted ocean liners seems too fitting in retrospect, since those supposed luxury vacationers are, in reality, trapped in racks of cell-like cabins on cruises to nowhere. These works have their own special allegorical impact. Subsequent subjects like aerial dogfights and motocross stunts retained a brash adolescence, which translates into a painterly style that persists in challenging the fine art world’s increasingly domesticated tastes.”

In an email, Estes said of Morley’s early paintings, “I remember first seeing his work and being encouraged by it to think that other artists were also working in a realistic manner, doing the forbidden thing—using photographs.”

Flack, in a recent telephone conversation, said, “I did not know Malcolm well, but I met him several times. He had a fiery personality—just like mine. The ocean liner paintings were really impressive. They were iconic. Malcolm was interested in archetypes, like I was. He was really not so interested in the cool, unemotional approach of most of the artists associated with Photorealism. Generally, the colors the Photorealists used were toned down. You couldn’t say that about Malcolm’s work, nor mine. Ultimately, Photorealism was not enough to contain him, or us. Malcolm had such an incredible, fertile mind, with so many ideas that had to come out.”

In recent years, Morley was preoccupied with developing a new genre of painting that he dubbed “Super-Post-Pop.” The works from this group he showed me in his studio had unmodulated, bold colors, hard-edge forms, and crisp lines. Jarring juxtapositions of seemingly incongruous elements were designed to convey complex narratives of the artist’s imagination, and transcend the deadpan irony associated with Pop.

He used children’s toys as models and sometimes built elaborate miniature tableaux that he then rendered in two dimensions. He felt that at this point in his career it was the best way for him to tell a story. One of the works I saw in the studio, Hobby Horse (2015), included in the Sperone Westwater exhibition, is a prime example of Super-Post-Pop. A strange battle appears to be in progress. A spaceship hovers above a group of soldiers in ancient garb who pull two Trojan horses while a column of fire rises above a distant fort. Here, Morley fuses the past and future in an explosive intergalactic battle.

David Salle’s Swamp Music and Solar System, both 2013.

©DAVID SALLE, VAGA AT ARS, NEW YORK/COURTESY SKARSTEDT, NEW YORK

Two large-format prints of David Salle paintings are going up on display on a historic building designed by the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White being redeveloped in the NoMad neighborhood of Manhattan. Swamp Music, which will overlook Fifth Avenue, measures 47 by 70 feet, and Solar System, around the corner to loom over 28th Street, is 44 by 66 feet. Taking up their home this weekend, both are works by the New York painter from 2013.

The limestone and terra cotta edifice is being restored in advance of the opening of a hotel in a conjoined tower by Flâneur Hospitality. Art advisor Elizabeth Margulies joined the company as a consultant for a project to repurpose scrims installed for construction purposes, and she will continue to organize art programming for the hotel slated to open in fall of next year.

In a statement Margulies said, “David’s work encourages reflection, individual contemplation, and the diversity of lived experiences. Our goal for the project is to get people to slow down, look up, and take in a brief moment of serendipity and discovery amidst the bustle of Fifth Avenue. This activation is also indicative of the unconventional engagement with art that you can expect to find in the hotel.”

A current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the early work of 30 artists constituting the last major art movement of the 20th century.

David Salle recently relayed to me a joke that began with this question: Why did the Conceptual artist start painting? Answer: Because he heard it was a good idea. “One of us made that up 30 years ago,” Salle said. “It was really funny then.” ¹

By “us,” Salle meant one of the artists in “The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984,” an exhibition opening this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A historical survey organized by the Met’s associate photography curator Douglas Eklund, the show re-examines the early work of 30 artists whom he identifies as members of the last definitive movement in 20th-century art. Named for Douglas Crimp’s 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at New York’s Artists Space, the group came of age by questioning the entire apparatus by which images from mass media determined, rather than merely described, our experience of the world. Where once artists made visual objects, this group made “meaning.”

“That was an important time,” says Helene Winer, the director of Artists Space from 1975 through 1980 (the year she and Janelle Reiring founded Metro Pictures gallery in New York). “It was one of the rare occasions when artists could make a distinctive break from prior work and identify it as something new. And I was in a position to show it.”

Eklund locates the birth of the Pictures generation in Los Angeles, in the early 1970s, with the “post-studio” classes that John Baldessari taught at the then-new California Institute of the Arts.

In the program, he liberated students from single-medium formalism and encouraged work with found photographs. He also emphasized a sense of social responsibility. For the Met show, Eklund proposes a cause-and-effect narrative that moves from CalArts to Manhattan, where young artists such as Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Sarah Charlesworth were independently seeking a path beyond Conceptualism and Pop. Others, including Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, Charles Clough and Michael Zwack, arrived from Buffalo, N.Y., where, as students, they had founded the multidisciplinary art space Hallwalls. But even before they moved to New York City, the Buffalo contingent started knocking on the door at Artists Space, which Longo has said was the place every young artist wanted to show.

If any one person can be said to have shaped the Pictures generation, it would be Winer. Eklund told me that his show is in some ways a tribute to her. She was the one who facilitated alliances among many of the artists.  It was she who asked Crimp to organize his now-legendary exhibition, which included Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Phillip Smith and Troy Brauntuch, and which few people saw. Much greater attention was paid to an essay on the subject that Crimp wrote for October two years later, dropping Smith and adding Sherman, who was not included in the exhibition because Artists Space had mounted a solo show of her work the previous year.

New attitudes toward quotation and critique were in the air at the time. But the Pictures group did not coalesce around shared interest in the mechanisms of representation alone. The social networks that formed among them fostered an atmosphere in which they could flourish, providing a ready audience to support and discuss the work. An especially unusual aspect of the group was that women enjoyed an unprecedented degree of prominence in it.

Among Pictures artists from CalArts were Salle, Goldstein, James Welling, Matt Mullican and Barbara Bloom, whose 1972 “advertisements” of steel windows for modernist homes, Crittall Metal Windows (1972), are the earliest works in the Met show. Painters Ross Bleckner and Eric Fischl were also at the school, and Nancy Chunn worked in the admissions office. Her boyfriend at the time, Paul McMahon, later to work closely with Winer at Artists Space, attended Pomona College. Before Winer came to New York in 1975, she was the college’s gallery director and presented exhibitions of artists such as William Leavitt, Bas Jan Ader and Allen Rupersberg. (None of these are represented in Eklund’s show, nor are any of the Pictures artists’ European contemporaries, such as Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel or Isa Genzken.)

Further examining the social interconnectedness of the group we find that Winer’s then-boyfriend, Jack Goldstein, a California-born artist who was friendly with Mullican, Welling and Salle, first showed his work in Los Angeles with Claire Copley.[pq]Baldessari’s program liberated students from the ghetto of single-medium formalism, encouraging them to work from found photographs.[/pq]She was Rupersberg’s girlfriend and also showed Goldstein, Salle and Leavitt. It was Copley who introduced Allan McCollum to Louise Lawler, with whom he would later collaborate, and who in turn introduced him to Levine. The group bonded at parties in New York given by McMahon and Chunn. Sometimes day jobs connected the artists. Lawler was a slide labeler at Leo Castelli when Reiring worked there as a registrar. 

Mullican arrived in New York in 1973, when the artist-run alternative space movement was under way, with 112 Greene Street (later White Columns), Artists Space, P.S.1, the Kitchen and Franklin Furnace eventually attracting a broad range of artists, experimental filmmakers, dancers and musicians. Of course, in the mid-1970s, they needed each other. The country was in a deep recession, and there was no market for their art. Having gone bankrupt, New York itself was as marginalized as they were, particularly after the Daily 
News claimed that then-president Gerald Ford told the city it could “drop dead” if it expected any help from the White House. Even the critics who first took the new media-based work seriously—Crimp, Craig Owens, Brian Wallis, Edit DeAk, Walter Robinson, Liza Bear, Thomas Lawson and others—were all friends and neighbors who saw the artists and each other nearly every day. Or night. They were all roughly the same age and hung out in the same bars, went to the same parties and (for those who made art) showed in the same artist-run spaces or clubs, played in each other’s rock bands and appeared in each other’s movies. 

To his credit, Eklund adventurously includes little-known works in various mediums by artists in the movement, such as the late ’70s films of Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum and Mika-TV (Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen). Early performances by Eric Bogosian are represented by videos, and a wide range of early photos by Welling, James Casebere and Brauntuch are included as well.  

After 1977, the downtown New York art world occupied three territories: the East Village, Tribeca and SoHo. The East Village was favored by slightly younger artists like Kiki Smith, Tom Otterness, Diego Cortez and Charlie Ahearn, who formed Colab (for Collaborative Projects) in 1978. This group was partly responsible for the New Cinema, a storefront on St. Marks Place, where artists such as James Nares, Jim Jarmusch, Becky Johnston and Vincent Gallo screened their Super-8 films. Colab was responsible for mounting the 1980 Times Square Show. In this one-month event, 100 artists, including a number of emerging graffiti artists, showed their works in a former massage parlor scheduled for demolition. 

By chance, I was afforded a ringside seat on this burgeoning scene when I went to work as a cook for Mickey Ruskin, founder of Max’s Kansas City in the 1960s, the favorite watering hole of both the denizens of Warhol’s Factory and the generation of Minimalists and older artists that included John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Brice Marden. They and the new artists were the steady clientele at the Locale in Greenwich Village, the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club on Chambers Street and the storied restaurant on Washington Square known simply by its address, One University Place. All of these places hosted wildly eclectic art shows by their patrons and presented artist-bands like Talking Heads, Alan Suicide and the Patti Smith Group. When the Mudd Club opened, in 1978, in a Tribeca building owned by Bleckner, everyone who didn’t already know everyone else met there.

“For me those friendships were empowering,” says Barbara Kruger, who skipped graduate school to work as an art director at Condé Nast, matching pictures to words. The Met show features a number of early Kruger pieces with cutting texts, such as I Can’t Look at You and Breathe at the Same Time (1981-84). “I didn’t have a group I came out of school with,” she explains, “I met Cindy before I saw her work. I met David Salle before his first show. We got to know what each other was doing, and there was this perfect storm of people who grew up with images from movies and TV, and didn’t think of painting as the only thing that could be called art. And many of us were women.”

This was indeed a pivotal moment for art. “Pictures Generation” features women who entered the art world at levels equal in importance to their male counterparts for the first time. Often, they surpassed men in terms of invention and impact. Most of the women—Kruger, Levine, Lawler, Sherman, Charlesworth, Bloom and Laurie Simmons—worked with photographic imagery, partly because photography was still regarded as a bastard child of art. This was a field they could have pretty much to themselves, while gaining the support, rather than the envy, of the bad-boy painters around them. 

“I turned to photography because I thought it was the dominant language of our culture,” says Charlesworth, who is represented in the show by photographs from her first two series of newspaper appropriation works, “Modern History” (1978) and “Stills” (1977). “I remember seeing Richard Prince’s first show at Anina Nosei and thinking, ‘Oh! This guy is interested in the same stuff I am,’” Charlesworth recalls. “Photography suited the things we wanted to address.”

Prince, the token male in the New York group, was taking a critical approach to appropriated photographs, most famously of the romantic Marlboro Man cowboy. But no man in the 1970s could have made Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80). Nearly a dozen works from the series are in the Met show. Here, Sherman presents female movie stereotypes with a caustic humor that mocks the way men fantasized about women, while giving women who internalize those stereotypes a sharp poke in the ribs. 

Bloom remembers seeing Levine’s appropriated Walker Evans photos and thinking, “Oh my God, that is so radical and so insane. It was also brilliant. Sherrie didn’t address any of the esthetic issues, just narrowed it down to the most essential idea about what constitutes ownership of an image, and that was it.”

Joel Wachs, now president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, was a city councilman in Los Angeles in the ’80s and an avid collector of art.[pq]In the mid-1970s the artists needed each other. The country was in a deep recession and there was no market for their art.[/pq]In 1984, he saw Levine’s “After Walker Evans” appropriations from 1981 and became the first person to buy one. “I remember having a hard time accepting it at first,” he says. “What was this art, copying someone else’s pictures? Then it started to open me up to a much broader way of thinking about art. The art itself had all the formal qualities I liked and also made people think about male dominance in the art world. Sherrie’s work was $300 and Cindy’s was $800, but some male painters were getting $75,000. When Kruger said, ‘Your body is a battleground,’ that was a clarion call for a political movement.”

Kruger says, “Our stake was different from the men’s. We were all engaged in a systemic critique of the images around us, where the guys were engaged in a substitutional critique. Their careers are filled with envy. Our commentaries were about the way our bodies were contained through culture, through pictures and language.” Charlesworth adds, “I got interested not just in how women are positioned through visual language,” she says, “but how as a culture we order and organize our relationships to world events.” 

These conversations became a cultural force in the decade Eklund covers in his show. The Pictures artists eventually became individual brands that, Eklund says, turned friends into rivals who competed in the marketplace, institutionalizing artists who had, up to 1980, expressed only distaste for institutions. “It’s no accident they became known as the Pictures generation, rather than the Blank generation or the Me generation,” says Eklund. Yet, adds Lawler, who never even used to sign her work, “You made objects to stimulate a dialogue, and if you’re not part of the dialogue, you’re not happening.”

Eklund’s show is not the first to take on this group. In 1989 both the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles mounted exhibitions featuring many of the same people, but the Metropolitan Museum gives the movement a certain institutional prestige. Eklund may insist that the artists’ immersion in common images started in school, but it was their personal associations that turned like-minded individuals into a generation whose pictures once made meaning and now make history.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW “The Pictures Generation, 1974–84” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Apr. 21–Aug. 2, 2009.

LINDA YABLONSKY is a novelist and critic based in New York.

Endnotes

1. All quotes are from author’s interviews with the subjects, unless otherwise noted.

ILLUSTRATION: KATHERINE MCMAHON

The following is an expanded version of a lecture delivered in the early 2000s.

When I was a kid of seven or eight, there was a TV show called Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I remember being particularly impressed by one episode about a guy who claimed to have eaten his car. It took him more than four years, but by chopping the car into tiny pieces and swallowing a little bit every day, this guy managed to eat the entire thing: steering wheel, chrome, tires, and all. He didn’t even know he was making art.

Here’s the situation as it stands today. Contemporary art is divided into two main camps. On the one side, we have the centuries-long continuity of work that is primarily pictorial in nature, and on the other, the growing body of work that is more presentational in attitude—that is, art that privileges intentionality and the delivery system, the context in which art appears. One type of art says, “Look at this,” while the other says, “Look at me looking at this,” or in a further evolution, “Look at me looking at you looking at this.” This not a distinction between painting and non-painting. There are plenty of non-painters making work with an outer-directed energy combined with pictorial intelligence.

Though intertwined in practice, the pictorial and the presentational represent two different worldviews, one identified with art as form, as something made, or something its maker arrives at, while the other regards art primarily as a set of cultural signs, or a strategy that produces an artifact, something meant to be read. This may sound like the old Duchampian distinction between the retinal and the cerebral, but the balance has tipped in a way that Duchamp could hardly have imagined 70 years ago. In the last few decades, the emphasis on theory, and on relational aesthetics generally has seriously eroded, if not invalidated, one of the core beliefs about how art functions. In times past, art was thought to possess a quality—something that stimulated the senses—called presence, or aura. Baldly put, a work of art was said to emanate this aura as a result of the transference of energy from the artist to the art, an aesthetic variant of the law of thermodynamics. Few people today would defend that idea. The question remains, what do we have to replace it with?

I recently visited the Zurich home of my friend, Bruno Bischofberger, the great collector and dealer who represents appropriation artist Mike Bidlo. In Bruno’s living room, by a window with a view onto Lake Zurich, was a Bidlo bicycle wheel sculpture, after Duchamp. You know—the wheel mounted upside-down on a simple wooden stool. Although an exact replica of the Duchamp original, which itself is an assemblage of commercially available objects, the Bidlo bicycle wheel lacked presence; it was, in fact, rather inert. Strange—how can that be? It’s an exact replica of a non-artisanal object. As we stood looking at Bidlo’s sculpture, Bruno’s wife, Yoyo, made the astute observation that “an artist’s work either has presence or it doesn’t, and although anything can have it, nothing has it necessarily.” It might sound like magical thinking, but the original—in this case a funny word to use—bicycle wheel is gratifying to look at. It has an aura. The replica, not so much. Is context alone, and the expectations that come with it, enough to explain the difference?

The disparity between the older view of art’s perceptual gestalt and that of Duchamp’s many descendants involves more than a distinction between expressionist and detached art, or warm art and cool. Cool art can be highly pictorial; perhaps most art that we remember is simultaneously pictorial and presentational. Like many things in life, it’s a matter of emphasis, a question of sensibility. Art is often bound up with certain abstract ideas: about space, materiality, cultural history, identity, narrative time, styles of representation, and the very nature of the image, to name only a handful. In the art that we tend to remember, those ideas are embodied by form. Advanced pictorial art also contains an element of the presentational; the presentational is baked in, in a way. Sophisticated paintings are self-aware, they present themselves. One thing art does is to strike a balance between those two aspects of the self, one quality acting as a brake on the other.

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

However, with the canonization of Duchamp following his death in 1968, presentational art began proliferating, and, like a drug, it soon swamped the brain’s receptors for other kinds of sensations. As the audience for contemporary art grew, work that engaged the delivery system itself began to eclipse the thing being delivered. There are a number of reasons that this approach to art making flourished, principal among them is simple demographics: the great increase in the number of young people enrolled in art schools and the adjacent curatorial programs. Another reason, also demographically determined, is the rise of the tourist model of international art fairs and biennials—what Peter Schjeldahl has dubbed “festivalism.” The context for art does, to some extent, shape what will be created.

We have also seen a proliferation of art whose function is to deliver content of a specific, legible sort, which, if you’re of a certain age, calls to mind the joke about the painter’s reply when asked what his work meant: “When I want to send a message, I call Western Union.” In social realist painting of the 1930s, a work was judged by what it had to say about class conflict. The visuals have changed but the criteria for judgment of message-laden art are still with us. Message first, art as a thing, second.

I’ll confess straightaway that the proliferation of presentational art makes my heart sink. The inconvenient truth is this: It’s easier to present art than to make it. It’s easier to select than it is to invent. It gets confusing, because some of the great pictorial inventors of the twentieth century, like Andy Warhol, obviously, appeared to be doing nothing more than choosing—but that was an illusion, something borrowed from the beauty industry, where the amount of time spent in the makeup chair is meant to result in an effortlessly natural look. To make something that really holds our attention, especially over repeated viewings, requires levels of integration—intellectual, visual, cultural—expressed with a unique physicality. Art that eschews this integration is unlikely to be durably compelling for the simple reason that less is at stake. One component without the others is like an unstable chemical compound; it will degrade, or, to continue the chemistry analogy, it will fail to catalyze. Over time, the result will come to have the flavor of commentary.

Sometimes I think we don’t know what kind of artists we want. Shaman or perceptual psychologist? Poète maudit or activist? Inventor or theoretician? Sacred monster or good citizen? Of course, we want all of the above and more, but at certain times one image of the artist holds more allure than others. There have always been the kinds of artists who present themselves as avatars of our perceived cultural moment, as if that’s the job description. And no doubt for some it is.

From time to time, the slate is wiped clean. New audiences arrive. Life goes on, artists adapt to new technologies, as always. Art in the largely presentational mode has now evolved further; it has embraced its seeming opposite and merged with the iconic spectacle, which, far from denying art’s aura, has transferred the idea of auratic vibration to how something can be staged for the camera. In the past, iconic status was conferred by history. Today, an artist may see no reason to wait, and will try to preempt the ratification process—by going straight to spectacle. Spectacle is a form of illustration—it illustrates an idea, usually a big one. Shock and awe, indeed. There has emerged a newish form, a kind of art whose pictorial values are meant to be understood, perhaps can only be understood, within the framing device of a magazine page, or a screen. I don’t mean here the staged photographs of Cindy Sherman, an artist more or less universally admired. I refer to a more controlled use of pictures within the systems, both social and editorial, that deliver them. We may have invented a new hybrid form of journalism and art combined, one derived from the 70-year tradition of the picture press.

The implications are kind of interesting. We find among art students now a reluctance to make any meaningful distinction between art and ads. I am, perhaps, generalizing, but it’s a noticeable shift. Today’s art students can’t easily recognize the difference, and also don’t see any particular need to do so. As I’ve suggested, maybe this is simply a different kind of aura, one that the audience is already sensitized to. Why not? A picture is a picture. An example of what I mean might be Maurizio Cattelan’s re-creation of the Hollywood sign in the hills above Palermo; the photograph in Artforum makes us smile; we appreciate its complex layers of cheekiness. But how many of us really feel compelled to go to Sicily to see it?

Frank Stella, never one to shy away from a fight, mince words, or go with the flow, has this to say:

Owing to its reading of Duchamp, the literalist art of the last twenty-five years has defined itself by the act of presentation. Artists have tried to make a mountain out of a molehill, and celebrate their ability to select objects and activities from daily life and to present them in a different context, the context of the art museum or gallery. Where literalist art challenges painting by asserting that the art of presentation is the equal of the art of creation, we have to recognize its lack of seriousness.

The New York art market flourished for a time in the 1980s, and this attracted the attention of the mainstream media. The art world hadn’t been considered interesting to talk about for a while—all that conceptual art making people feel stupid—and now there was something to dress up for. The gossip was amusing, some of the personalities were colorful. Most talk about the art of the ’80s and ’90s is really talk about the art world as a social system, and while this may be mildly interesting, it’s not the same, nor as interesting, as the art itself. The art market was robust, briefly, after a period of quietude that had gone on so long it was considered the norm, and when it changed, some people, instead of taking the long view, had an attitude about it. They stopped looking at the work. I remember sometime in the early ’90s receiving a query from something called the Nordic Art Review that posed the stark question, “The 1980s: what was it good for?”

At least as far back as the Renaissance, the arts have been populated by eccentrics with strange and sometimes alarming personal habits—the Mannerist painter Il Rosso, for instance, reportedly lived with an ape as his domestic companion. Closer to our own time, Calvin Tomkins, in his biography of Duchamp, describes a peripheral artist of Duchamp’s circle of the late ’20s in New York, a proto-performance artist who used to walk down Fifth Avenue with live birds pinned to her skirts, as being “unhampered by sanity.” I don’t think we’d want it any other way. One way a work of art takes on meaning is when its formal, pictorial patterns resonate with systems of attention in the larger world. Another way is when the larger-than-life personality of the artist accomplishes a similar cultural rhyme. When something is judged to be passé, what’s really meant is that the image of the artist encoded in certain patterns of behavior is the wrong one for the moment. Hemline too long, or too short.

Fashions do change. A disheartening aspect of the art world of the 1980s was its willingness to indulge in ad hominem attacks disguised as a defense of certain values. Much of the criticism of ’80s art was nakedly elitist. People didn’t like a painting because they didn’t like the people who did. Critic Robert Hughes’s venomous attack on ’80s art included contempt for its collectors, and the smug tagline “newly minted art for newly minted money” was thrown around, as if the Farnese or Borghese were fundamentally different in their day. Today we can see Hughes’s rhetoric for the distasteful snobbery that it was.

But let’s return for a moment to the problem of representation. It’s been the case for quite a while—at least since Picasso—that how well a work reproduces in the media plays a significant role in its popularity; the work of the most acclaimed artists from the ’60s, for instance, look fabulous in reproduction. This isn’t to suggest that those works didn’t also have tremendous physical presence, but the fact remains, most people are familiar with a work of art through reproduction; those who have the good fortune to experience a painting firsthand are fewer in number, and those who have the luxury of actually living with it are very few indeed. But that’s different from the situation I’m describing: art that tangibly occupies three-dimensional space, yet seems to exist in more compelling form when seen in a magazine than it does in real life.

What is the difference exactly? Art conceived as spectacle comes from a different impulse, essentially that of an art director, and is the legacy of conceptual art fused with irony. Art direction is the science of directing attention, often to a con; a place of making you think you’re smarter or more attractive than you are. Increasingly, the art world is in thrall to the triumph of art direction, something which places art in the service of the ironic presentation of forms, our distance from which is the art’s message. As noted earlier, kids in art schools today don’t care about the distinction between art and ads. And why, you might ask, should they, as long as no one else does. I’m not referring to art made out of the raw material of advertising imagery—works like Richard Prince’s Marlborough Man—but rather to the increasingly porous boundary between public and private, between inner and outer directed impulses. This is in fact the generating impulse behind some of the more radical of the recent art. And in a way, I feel a little twinge of responsibility.

At CalArts in the halcyon early ’70s, when the school was still flush with Disney money, students could apply for grants to carry out special projects. I once sat on the panel to pick the winners. One guy asked for $3,000—a lot of money at the time—so that he could hoist a television and generator up to a remote mountaintop, where he intended to watch reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies and then, mid-episode, blast the TV screen with a 12-gauge shotgun. We offered him $300 with the suggestion that he check into the worst fleabag hotel in downtown Los Angeles and shoot out the television in his room with a BB gun. Sometimes, less is more. Since that innocent time, things have developed dramatically, and museums now routinely fly artists around the world to create works that are subsequently photographed and disseminated through the art publications and social media to produce the kind of photographic aura we’re talking about. Nice work if you can get it, as the saying goes, and what we’re left with is an image in a magazine.

A version of this text was recently published in How to See: Looking, Talking and Thinking About Art by David Salle. ©2016 David Salle. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of ARTnews on page 82 under the title “School of Presentation.”