Hey there, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Big Think is a kind of online think tank, powerful ideas from some of the world's most creative thinkers

distilled into small, shareable doses. The Think Again podcast remixes this formula. The producers pick surprise idea clips from over 10,000 of them in our archives.

My guests and I watch them and discuss, and from there the conversation can go anywhere.

I'm very happy to be here today with artist David Sallie.

His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art,

the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Berlin, and many others.

His book, How to See, is a collection of essays, mainly on the work of other artists that delves

deep into questions about how art is made and what happens when we experience it.

Welcome to think again, David.

Thank you.

So your book is largely, it's a collection of essays that discuss your reactions to and

possibly the intentions of and the processes of other artists.

It's interesting that, you know that you being a very accomplished artist,

you don't talk much about your own work at all.

I'm curious what the intention is there.

What are you trying to achieve by going so deeply into other work?

There's a whole tradition, as you know, of artists

writing about, talking about their own work,

which I have done, to my my mind ad nauseum in catalogs

and interviews and whatnot. This book is a collection of pieces written for periodicals for

general interest magazines like town and country or sometimes art magazines like art form.

...