Live from LACMA: David Salle and Yana Peel

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The Defining Elements

• Painter and critic David Salle spoke live at LACMA in Los Angeles with Yana Peel, President of Arts, Culture & Heritage at CHANEL.
• Salle trained at CalArts (the California Institute of the Arts, founded by Walt Disney), arriving as part of the school’s inaugural cohort alongside figures including John Baldessari and Allan Kaprow.
• His cross-disciplinary practice spans painting, film directing (Search and Destroy, produced with Martin Scorsese), set and costume design for ballet, and art criticism published in the New York Review of Books.
• Salle worked with an engineer to create a tailored AI curriculum, drawing on art-historical references and then on his own past paintings, to produce a new body of work called the new pastorals.
• My Frankenstein, his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in 30 years, opened at Sperone Westwater and uses the Frankenstein title ironically to challenge the idea that AI poses an existential threat to human artistic practice.

A Conversation Rooted in Five Decades of Practice

The setting is LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, whose collection includes work by Salle himself. Yana Peel, who oversees arts, culture and heritage at CHANEL, sits across from the painter for a 26-minute conversation that moves between personal biography, art-world economics, and the question of what intelligent image-making actually requires. CHANEL‘s long investment in cultural programming gives the exchange an institutional weight that goes beyond a straightforward interview format.

Salle’s position is unusual: he has been an active painter, a working film director, a ballet collaborator, and a published critic simultaneously. The conversation draws out how those strands connect rather than compete, tracing a through-line from his first year at CalArts in the early 1970s to a solo exhibition in 2026. For an audience interested in how luxury and cultural institutions intersect, the CHANEL Connects series provides a direct window into that relationship.

CalArts, John Baldessari, and the Return to Painting

Salle arrived at CalArts at 17, having never previously lived in a city. He describes the school’s founding ethos as one of radical trust: the faculty proceeded on the assumption that every student was already an artist, and almost nothing was forbidden. John Baldessari was present, as was Allan Kaprow; Paul Brach served as dean of the art school. The atmosphere was generative partly because it was economically brutal outside: a severe US recession in the mid-1970s had frozen the New York gallery system, and young artists were largely ignored by the market.

Returning to painting at CalArts felt transgressive in that context. There was a prevailing view that painting belonged to a historically bounded era, and that serious practice required another form entirely. Salle resisted that consensus, framing his return not as a discovery but as a reaffirmation of something central to his identity. The economic thaw of the early 1980s and the Whitney exhibition that followed were, in his account, largely a matter of timing rather than any shift in his fundamental approach.

AI as Curriculum, Not Replacement

The most substantial portion of the conversation concerns Salle’s engagement with artificial intelligence, which he first encountered while developing a mobile game designed to let users experience the process of making visual juxtapositions. The project never became a game, but it exposed him to AI image generation and immediately clarified what was wrong with it: the systems had been built by engineers with no grounding in the visual arts, and the results showed it. Arresting and occasionally strange, but nothing that felt like art.

His response was methodical. Working with an engineer, he first built a curriculum from art-historical examples selected to illustrate specific visual qualities: diagonal pattern from one work, compositional rhythm from another, edge treatment from a third. References cited in the conversation include Giorgio de Chirico, Edward Hopper, and Arthur Dove. Once that broader curriculum produced useful results, Salle narrowed the training to elements drawn exclusively from his own past paintings. The outcome became the new pastorals. He is careful to describe AI as a tool, drawing a direct parallel to John Baldessari’s early defence of video art: the medium is neither inherently good nor bad, and the quality of the result depends entirely on the intention behind it.

My Frankenstein, the exhibition title, plays deliberately on the popular conflation of Frankenstein the scientist with Frankenstein’s monster. Salle uses the name ironically, inverting the fear that AI will usurp human creativity to argue the opposite: that the technology has no autonomous intention, and the idea of it replacing artists is, in his word, nonsensical. The show opened at Sperone Westwater, one of three galleries he names alongside Lehmann Maupin and Throw Patch.

Why It Matters

For collectors and cultural patrons across the GCC, where institutional investment in contemporary art continues to grow and the debate around AI-generated work is increasingly present in museum and gallery programming, this conversation offers a grounded perspective from an artist who has navigated the technology directly rather than theoretically. CHANEL’s decision to host the exchange at LACMA, and to frame it within its broader commitment to arts, culture and heritage, reflects the Paris-based house’s sustained engagement with serious cultural discourse alongside its creative industries profile.

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