Dennis Hollingsworth

Armory Live Talks: The Painting Life

Here are my notes from the NYC Armory 2017 Art Fair symposium featuring David Salle as the moderator with four distinguished fellow painters based in New York City. Of the four, Alex Katz was the stand out, sparkling and spry at 89 years old dropping bon mots at regular intervals. "I think the idea of the masterpiece is 19th century baloney."

Salle's questions to the panel were hilariously relentless, each well read, sometimes showy in this regard. They were the kind of queries that at times seemed better suited for a dinner party, a party game, and this had the effect of making the audience feel intimate and at ease. My personal ambition is to talk more pointedly about where we are in art history, where we've been and where do we think we might be going. What is painting after it had defied its demise? What can be salvaged from art in the 20th century and what must be tossed in history's trash bin? What stars should we navigate by in a 21st century that we are almost twenty years into? If the idea of a conceptualism liberated from the medium (the conceit that declared painting obsolete) is an absurd proposition (the ramification of painting's survival), then what is the interrelationship between thoughts and the (several) mediums of expression?

Well, I wasn't the moderator, David Salle was. Temerity is the artists' occupational hazard, after all.

Artist Talk | David Salle | The Painting Life
PARTICIPANTS: Joe Bradley, Artist, New York; Alex Katz, Artist, New York; Dana Schutz, Artist, New York; Chris Martin, Artist, New York
MODERATOR: David Salle, Artist, New York