David Salle, “What is the reason,” 1984
Chris Reitz Lecture | 80's Thrift, Salle and Sherman, Artist Connoisseurs
During the recession of the 1970s, and in response to limited commercial outlets for advanced art, David Salle and Cindy Sherman developed “thrifty” compositional strategies. They were derived from middle-class consumer habits that aggregated vintage cultural material to evidence one’s taste and powers of connoisseurship (one’s ability to make a “look”). As it turned out, their rather fashionable aggregation of cultural material mirrored the curated aggregation of objects by the growing network of art fairs where Salle and Sherman’s work was eventually distributed. In this talk, Reitz argues that the artists and art fairs of the 1980s took up tactics of “thrift” as they also took on the role of cultural connoisseur, a role that had been abandoned by art critics and historians in the 1970s.
About Chris Reitz
Chris Reitz is Director and Chair of the Hite Institute of Art + Design and Associate Professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies. His research focuses on transnational art and exhibitions of the past 30 years, with a particular emphasis on themes and practices of labor and leisure.
Professor Reitz has worked as a project manager at Public Art Fund in New York and as an independent curator. His first book, Martin Kippenberger: Everything is Everywhere, was published by MIT Press in 2023. His writing has appeared in a number of prominent academic and trade publications, including Nonsite, October, Texte zur Kunst, N+1, The White Review, Paper Monument, The Baffler, and Martin Kippenberger’s Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings, Volume III.
Professor Reitz serves as the Hite Institute of Art + Design’s primary curator, and in that capacity has organized solo exhibitions for Judy Chicago, Sanford Biggers, Sislej Xhafa, For Freedoms, and Peter Williams, in addition to the group exhibitions Painting in the Network, Algorithm and Appropriation and Conspiratorial Aesthetics, among others.
Professor Reitz is also a member of Louisville’s Commission on Public Art and was appointed to the mayor’s commission tasked with making recommendations concerning Louisville’s contested monuments. For his work in service to the community he received the President’s Distinguished Faculty award in 2018.
