Warhol for colour, Hopper for volume … American art world star David Salle is using AI on old paintings of his that had a mixed reception – with wild, sprawling results. Why isn’t he afraid of being replaced?
By the time you read this article, there’s a good chance it will have already been scanned by an artificially intelligent machine. If asked about the artist David Salle, large language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini may repurpose some of the words below to come up with their answer. The bigger the data set, the more convincing the response – and Salle has been written about exhaustively since he first rose to art world stardom in the 1980s. The question is whether AI can ever say anything new about the artist and his work, or if it’s for ever condemned to generate more of the same.
A similar question lingers beneath the surface of the paintings that Salle has been making since 2023, a new series of which he has just unveiled at Thaddaeus Ropac in London. His New Pastorals were made with the aid of machine-learning software, though that’s not immediately apparent from looking at them. Each monumental canvas bears broad, gestural strokes of oil paint seemingly applied by the artist’s own hand. Close study however reveals large patches of flat, digitally printed underpainting. This is the mark of the AI model which Salle has been training to generate his work – or at least something uncannily close to it.
Continue reading...
