Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm

in The Honest Rainmaker ), wrote,
    Professor Canfield Hatfield was a supposedly real-life character who figured prominently in racetrack operations and betting schemes of all types in this country in the first part of the twentieth century. Among the Professor’s many activities to promote belief in a higher system of control over seemingly random events were his exploits as a paid maker of rain for drought-stricken communities in the West—a high-wager kind of job and by extension a useful metaphor for the relationship between risk, hope, and fraud that enter into any art-making or rain-making situation.
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    The lax genre of personality journalism would not seem to be the most congenial medium for a man of David Salle’s sharp, odd mind and cool, irritable temperament. And yet this forty-one-year-old painter has possibly given more interviews than any other contemporary artist. Although the published results have, more often than not, disappointed him, they have not deterred him from further fraternization with the press; when I was interviewing him, in 1992 and 1993, he would regularly mention other interviews he was giving. One of them—an interview with Eileen Daspin, of the magazine W —turned out badly. Salle lost his subject’s wager that the interviewer’s sympathetic stance wasn’t a complete sham, and had to endure the vexation of reading a piece about himself that shimmered with hostility and turned his words against him. “It can’t be easy being David Salle in the 1990’s,” Daspin wrote in the October 1993 issue. “He is definitely out. Like fern bars and quiche. A condition that’s a little hard to take after having been one of the genius artist boy wonders of the Eighties.” This was the style and tone of the article. Salle himself sounded petulant and egotistical. (“I was completely ignored by the same people at the beginning of my career who then celebrated me and who are now happy to ignore me.”)
    A month or so later, Salle told me of his feelings about the article. “I read it very, very quickly, in disgust, and threw the magazine in the trash. I had been ambushed. I should have known better. I have no one to blame but myself. She gave off plenty of signals that should have raised alarms. It led to my saying interesting things—except I said them to the wrong person.”
    â€œIt interests me that you always take responsibility for the interview—that if you don’t like it, you blame yourself rather than the interviewer.”
    â€œOh, I can blame her,” Salle said. “I didn’t do it single-handed. She did it. She kept saying ‘What does it feel like to be a has-been? Don’t you feel bad being put in the position of a has-been?’ and I kept saying—with a misguided sense of pedagogical mission—‘Well, you have to understand that this has a context and a history and a trajectory.’ I was talking about the tyranny of the left. But it came out with her saying merely how angry and unhappy I was about being a has-been. All the pains I took to explain the context had gone for nothing.”
    â€œShe made you sound like a very aggressive and unpleasant person.”
    â€œMaybe I am. I was trying out the thesis that the art world lionizes bullies. In any case, I’m reaching the point where I’m resigned to being misinterpreted. Instead of seeing this as a bad fate that befell me through no fault of my own, I now see it as a natural state of affairs for an artist. I almost don’t see how it can be otherwise.”
    â€œThen why do you give all these interviews?”
    Salle thought for a moment. “It’s a lazy person’s form of writing. It’s like writing without having to write. It’s a form in which one can make something, and I like to make things.”
    I remembered something Salle had once made that had failed, like the W interview, and that