All language subtitles for American Masters - Jasper Johns Ideas in Paint 1989_Track03

(whimsical music)

- [Narrator] Jasper Johns may be the most important

American artist of our times.

From his first show in 1958, he has been one

of the major forces in modern art.

His art is accessible, yet full of nuance and mystery.

Ordinary objects, rethought and reborn.

Riddles of abstraction.

Riddles of representation.

And through it all, a consistent thread.

- There's probably very few people you could name

who haven't been touched by Jasper.

And not so much as doing what Jasper does,

but being influenced by how Jasper thinks

about what he does.

- $6,400,000.

Telephone bidder, against you all in here, fair warning.

That's $6,400,000.

(gavel bangs) Telephone bidder.

- [Narrator] In recent years, the value of Johns' work

has risen to staggering heights.

He now commands the highest prices

of any living artist in the world.

Is his art the ultimate commodity

in a materialistic society?

Or is it really exceptional?

Not everyone thinks so.

- You see, I look upon Johns' career as being

pretty much a downhill slide from a very not terribly high

point to begin with.

- [Narrator] Johns' circle has included

some of the most important creative figures

in American life.

People like painter Robert Rauschenberg,

composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

- The experience can give you a different kind of sense

about what life is about.

And certainly, Jasper's way of looking at things

has done that for many of us.

- I had a book which you could put

alongside "Finnegans Wake" and line for line

it would explain the mysteries of "Finnegans Wake".

But once they're explained, the book itself remains

just as mysterious.

(piano music)

(jazz music)

- [Worker] No that was something it's not supposed to do.

That was on that series on the left there.

If you wanna open that up, you can take like a spray--

- [Jasper] It depends on what it joins.

- [Worker] Um, that's summer.

(haunting music)

- [John] I like what I see to be real or to be my idea

of what is real.

And I think I have a kind of resentment against illusion

when I can recognize it.

- In the process of painting a picture,

Johns does not feel that he is providing every answer.

In fact, the painting itself is asking a question

as much as it's providing an answer.

- [John] Also, a large part of my work has been involved

with the painting as object as real thing in itself.

And in the place of that tragedy, so far,

my general development has moved in the direction

of using real things as painting.

(piano music)

- We may have to edit this out,

but I mean, Jasper's a classic kind of dauber,

and I like the daubing and sort of because it's like getting

into the painting.

To me, it's a kind of sort of a, I don't know,

you could say very sophisticated or very unsophisticated

version of finger painting.

- He once painted the "Flag", which made him notorious.

But in fact, his work is very difficult.

Quite conservative, except technically,

where it is very experimental.

- [John] At times, I will attempt to do something

which seems quite uncalled for in the painting

so that the work won't proceed so logically

from where it is, but will go somewhere else.

My experience of life is that it's very fragmented.

In one place, certain kinds of things occur.

And in another place, a different kind of thing occurs.

I would like my work to have some vivid indication

of those differences.

(jazz music)

I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.

- [Narrator] Time magazine 1959, Jasper Johns,

29, is the brand new darling of the art world's bright,

brittle avant-garde.

A year ago, he was practically unknown.

Since then, he has had a sell-out show in Manhattan

and has exhibited in Paris and Milan.

Something remarkable happened at Johns' first show.

Alfred Barr, the guiding light

of New York's Museum of Modern Art,

bought three of his paintings for the museum,

an unprecedented honor for a young artist.

Venice, 1988.

Three decades later, Jasper Johns has emerged

as the preeminent American painter and printmaker.

The Philadelphia Museum presents his work

as the American entry to the Venice Biennale,

one of the world's most prestigious art events.

Johns is awarded the grand prize.

Time magazine now compares him to Rembrandt.

- It seemed obvious that that was gonna happen to Jasper.

You know, it didn't seem obvious to me

that it would happen to me.

And, you know, but I didn't,

who cared about those kind of things?

I mean, it wasn't really interesting.

I mean, making the paintings is what you cared about.

- [John] One would like not to be led.

Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved.

Remove the signs of thought.

It is not thought which needs showing.

- [Narrator] Making art is the center of Jasper Johns' life.

That is all that can easily be said about him.

When one tries to establish a fix on why he creates

or what his art means, there are no simple answers.

- There may or may not be an idea and the meaning

may just be that the painting exists.

And then like anything,

disturbs people or calms people or what they find,

people find something to do with it.

It's in the space in which they are.

And they react to it as they would to anything else.

(drill whirring)

- Yeah. - Like several twists.

- [Narrator] Although the man and his art are elusive,

his effect on those around him is hard to miss.

There is a noticeable tension in the air

when he enters the US Galleries in Venice.

This is Johns' first major show in 13 years.

He is nervous, concerned, focused on every little detail.

- Why can't it be done today?

Why can't the things be put in the wall today

so that whenever we have the picture,

we can decide which goes where.

They're the same size.

- Most art historians think that artists create

the way art historians write.

But finally it comes down to the making of the object

and making it as beautiful, as disturbing as this, as that,

as possible, that the artist is trying to achieve.

And that is the case with Johns.

And at one point I asked him what are his great ambitions.

And he said something to the effect that simply

to make each thing I do well.

- [John] We say one thing is not another thing,

or sometimes we say it is, or we say they are the same.

- So, looked at the name under the painting

and it said Jasper Johns,

a name that I had never heard before.

And at that time, when I first saw it,

I did not understand that it was a target.

But as luck would have it, a few days later,

I went to Rauschenberg studio and then Rauschenberg said,

well, that we wanted to have a drink,

perhaps, while we were looking at his painting.

And he didn't have an icebox but Jasper Johns

on the floor below had one.

I couldn't wait to see his painting and ask Bob.

But we could not interrupt the proceedings there

at his studio and go down to Jasper's studio

and see what he was doing.

So, good guy that Rauschenberg was, he said,

"Fine, let's go."

And so we went down.

And then I was confronted with a miraculous array

of unprecedented images.

- [Narrator] Castelli offered Johns his first show

on the spot and has represented him ever since.

(eccentric music)

- One night, I dreamed I'd painted a large American flag,

and the next morning, I got up and I went out

and bought materials to begin it.

There are some things I stitched

onto the canvas with thread.

It's a very rotten painting because I began it

in like a house enamel paint,

but it wouldn't dry quick enough.

And then I had, in my head, this idea

of something I had read, I had heard, I don't know what,

about wax encaustic.

And I changed in the middle of the painting to that,

because the encaustic just has to cool.

And then it's hard and you don't blur it again.

- [Narrator] Johns described his flags and targets

as things the mind already knows.

A stark contrast with the art of the abstract expressionists

whose images could be read as emotional Rorschach tests.

- The people who followed

and did imitation abstract expressionism were fairly boring.

And there was a hiatus, there was a dull moment there

in American art.

And there was a longing,

there was a need for something to happen.

- [Narrator] Johns proposed a cooler alternative,

using real things as a point of departure,

but only as a formal device.

- And the paintings that followed immediately,

which were paintings of targets and numbers,

gave me the same opportunity to feel removed

from the work, neutral toward it.

Involved in the making

but not involved in the judging of it.

- The activity of making,

just the process was preeminent in Jasper.

And the results seemed like they would take care of itself

once the supposition was stated,

whether it was going to be a map or a target or whatever.

And that gave him a great freedom to intensely

follow the program within the limitation

that he set for himself.

- It doesn't just refer to things which are images,

but even ways of doing things within the painting.

Ways of painting, if it occurs to me that there is a way

of painting that I can introduce into my work

that I have not used before,

that somehow I will become a more skillful artist.

(chuckles)

I don't know that that's true at all.

- He had taken painting

to the last place it could go, really.

I mean, you know, by using essentially

two-dimensional objects and flattening them out

and then realizing that they weren't that flat

and the wax helped to dispel

the idea that they were that flat.

But those images were so arresting and so beautifully done.

I mean, other people have done that but it never worked.

- Johns has also been playing, really, from the start.

You look at those Ballantine Ale cans that painted bronze.

And is it a still life?

Is it a joke?

Is it a monument?

Is it to fool your eye or not?

And you find these kind of paradoxical questions

at the core of almost everything Johns has done.

- I heard that Bill de Kooning had said about Leo,

with whom he was annoyed over something,

"That son of a bitch, you could give him two beer cans

"and he could sell them."

And at that time, I had made a couple of sculptures.

I had made one or two flashlight

and one or two of a light bulb.

And when I heard this story I thought,

what a fantastic sculpture for me.

I mean, really, just absolutely perfect.

So, I made this work.

I did it.

And Leo sold it.

- [Narrator] Two artists were at the center

of this artistic revolution that rejected abstraction

of favor of real images.

While Jasper Johns opted for detachment,

making us see ordinary things in new ways,

his friend Robert Rauschenberg combined

highly charged images because of their meanings.

Their art signaled the end of the dominance of abstract art

in America and laid the groundwork for both pop art

and minimalism.

- I mean, Rothko, I remember, was extremely depressed

and felt almost humiliated that people

who had bought his paintings would have such bad taste

as to buy Johns or Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol.

- It was a terrifically elegant razzle-dazzle

of flower and Jasper's, I remember.

He had on white tie and teals.

He likes to dress high style.

And there were bunches of these dowagers in evening gowns

draped with jewels there.

And it was this occasion that I connect that story

and I have the impression that I actually heard this.

And it's typical of him that he,

one of these dowagers was cross-questioning him

and she said, "Well, Mr. Johns, I know you come

"from the old south.

"And I assume you come from an old plantation family."

And he looked her straight in the eye and said,

"No, ma'am, I'm poor white trash."

(acoustic music)

- [John] My work feeds upon these to use.

My work has something else to it.

A constant negation of myself and partly due to my feelings

place a different kind of thing occurs.

I include them.

Deluge, has state, with paint, rub it while,

but o'er the mirror, canvas.

In my early work, I tried to hide my personality,

my psychological state, by recognizing...

(train horn honking)

- [Narrator] Jasper Johns grew up

in Allendale, South Carolina, a small country town.

- [Marion] Back there, when Jasper was here,

it was such a small town.

You went out to play and you didn't even have to say

where you were going because everybody took care of you.

- [Narrator] Jasper's grandfather, W.I. Johns,

a prosperous farmer, had been one of the founders

of Allendale County.

- [Marion] And Jasper used to come home with me from school.

And Granddaddy'd pick him up after supper.

That was after he was old enough to go to school.

Because he came to his grandfather when he was two.

- [Narrator] After his parents separated,

Jasper's home was his grandfather's old brick house.

Both parents lived a few blocks away.

- [John] Not a lie statement it has to be what

you can't avoid, a deliberate, helpless statement.

It has to be final.

The deliberate statement has to be

what you can't avoid saying.

I think that life, the sense of life, the final statement,

has to be what you can't avoid saying.

I think that one wants from a painting a sense

of a sense of life, a final suggestion.

Life, the final you can't statement has one wants.

It has to be what you sense of life.

Final suggestion, the final statement,

has to be a deliberate botch, a deliberate can't.

Avoid saying...

- It had been my intention to be an artist

since I was a child.

And in the place where I was a child,

there were no artists, and there was no art.

So I really didn't know what that meant.

And I think it meant that I would be able to be

in a situation other than the one that I was in.

I think that was the primary fantasy.

Whereas the society there seemed to accommodate

every other thing I knew about, but not that possibility.

So I think that, in part, the idea of being an artist

was that kind of fantasy.

Of being out of this.

Then, because there's none of this here,

so if you're going to be it, you have to be somewhere else.

(jazz music)

- [Narrator] Johns arrived in New York in the early '50s.

He was working as a night clerk at Marlboro Books

when he first met Robert Rauschenberg,

a somewhat more established but still starving artist.

One of the things the two did to support themselves

was creating window displays.

- Well, the concept was nature morte, still lifes.

And having just gotten a book on famous still lifes,

I thought gee, that'd make wonderful windows for Tiffany.

I was new at Tiffany.

This happened, I think, in '56.

And who else to do it except Bob and Jasper, you know?

Well, with Bob and Jasper, you see,

I wasn't showing their serious work, really.

They were creating display things for me.

And that, to me, is very serious work.

It's not serious enough to other artists, I suppose.

But I think one influences the other.

It can't help it, you know?

What you are comes out in whatever you do.

It doesn't matter whether you're doing

windows or a painting.

- There was one thing that they were doing in which

they took a big Casaba melon.

They made it out of stuff and it looked like

somebody had taken a knife and whacked it.

And then they put it in Tiffany's windows with diamonds

and jewels hanging all over it.

- I wanted him to cast everything in dimension

and then give it a painterly quality.

And so they did.

They cast real pomegranates.

They cast the open pomegranate.

They looked so real, it was unbelievable.

They looked as real as they do in the painting.

They really collaborated.

And I don't know who did what.

You know, exactly as those flowers.

I don't know why I say Jasper, but I just,

mm, immediately think of Jasper

when I look at those flowers.

I don't know, maybe Bob did them.

But I had the feeling Jasper did them.

(chuckles)

- [Narrator] They were great windows,

but after Johns' first successful shows,

window design wasn't needed to pay the rent.

- Originally, with the targets and flags and so forth,

one could say that one wasn't interested in the subjects,

but one was interested in the painting.

But now we're in the position of having to say

that we're interested in everything.

- [Narrator] Johns is largely a self-taught artist.

Of much more importance than a formal education

were the friendships that he developed early in his career

with a group of talented artists.

- There was a period in my life where Merce, John,

and Bob Rauschenberg and I were very close.

And

we all were together very often.

And since all three of them were and are artists

that I admire very highly,

I look to them for

probably for ideas.

And for approval of what I did,

John being the most sort of teachy member of the group.

And probably having

a clearer understanding of all the different

mediums involved that we were all using.

He was of extreme importance to me in that time.

- [Narrator] While Cage's work has moved

from traditional composition to performances based

on chance, Johns continues to create his art

through intense struggle.

- [Piano Player] Okay, so I have to hit it

just to the right.

- Well, you see, I think often in my choices

I go through a kind of

a process of psychological disturbance that would be

very offensive to John.

And he would find it absolutely foolish.

And worse than foolish, offensive.

I believe (chuckles).

- But that allows for immediately a complexity

in one way or another.

And I think that very thing appealed to me,

to my eye, to my sense of the way I look at a painting

right from the beginning.

And I think, perhaps, it's because in my own work

I have a tendency to deal in complexity rather than,

so to speak, simple things involving dancing,

involving movement.

- [Narrator] In the late '60s, Johns served

as the artistic advisor for the Cunningham Dance Company.

His target image is still the company's emblem.

He created costumes and sets for a number of works,

including "Walkaround Time" which also paid homage

to another of his artistic sources of inspiration,

Marcel Duchamp.

The set for "Walkaround Time" is based

on the Duchamp composition "Large Glass".

(abstract warbling)

It was Rauschenberg who took Johns

to the Philadelphia Museum to see their Duchamp collection.

Marcel Duchamp was a well-known Cubist painter

when his "Nude Descending a Staircase"

shocked the art world in 1913.

During the first World War, Duchamp was one of the founders

of the anti-art movement known as Dada.

Art was a question of definition.

If one said it was art, it was.

- My God, painting the American flag.

I mean, it's sort of the ultimate Dada gesture.

Or painting a flag of the United States.

I mean, and this reintroduced a certain element

of what you can call the absurd from Dada.

And what I would call certain element of nihilism.

- My Aunt Gladys, once, when she read a thing in a magazine,

wrote me a letter saying she was so proud of me

because she had worked so hard to instill some respect

for the American flag in her students.

And she was so glad the mark had been left (chuckles) on me.

- [Narrator] When Duchamp called ordinary things works

of art, he was making an assault on the very nature of art.

Johns seems more interested in ambiguity and transformation

when he works with everyday objects.

- There's one period in which he was studying

Duchamp's notes for "The Large Glass" very carefully,

and he did sketchbook notes.

And he does, from time to time, do sketchbook notes,

but not very often.

I mean, things will mainly arise out of an encounter

with something that provokes him.

- [Narrator] Duchamp has obviously aroused Johns' interest.

The "Mona Lisa" alludes to Duchamp's "Mona Lisa" satire.

And Duchamp's own profile shows up in Johns' paintings.

Johns is also interested in the ideas

of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein,

who felt that the world could be defined

by logic and precise language.

Wittgenstein talked about pictures as models of reality,

suggesting that their elements should be related

in the same way that real things are.

Both Johns and Wittgenstein are attracted to areas

where logic breaks down.

Where things seem real but are not.

Wittgenstein says, "I am shown the duck rabbit

"and asked what it is.

"I may say it's a duck rabbit,

"but I may also react to the question quite differently.

"Had I replied, it's a rabbit,

"the ambiguity would have escaped me."

(somber jazz music)

(soft jazz music)

Jasper Johns' art has involved a subtle

and continuous shifting of ground.

There would be a series of paintings

whose primary focus was the brush strokes,

the colors, the juxtapositions,

the sorts of things that emerge when an artist

focuses on the physical process of painting.

But Johns is just as interested in working with ideas

and associations.

In these paintings, the observer is invited

to try to follow the artist's thought process

and understand his intentions.

- Sometimes, you will have an idea when you have a painting,

whereas you had no idea before you had a painting.

Sometimes, there's a very clear image established

ahead of time and you simply have to execute it.

Sometimes, you want to engage in a kind of activity

and see what it'll produce.

- [Narrator] Johns painted in the studio in 1982.

- I had seen an empty canvas propped against a painting

in my studio.

And that accounts for the sort of empty rectangle

that goes in a slight perspective.

I had some wax casts of an arm of a child,

a three-dimensional object in relation

to this representation of space in the canvas.

There's a strip of wood that comes out

from the surface of the painting.

I was playing with that kind of thought on one level

of real things in space and suggestion of things in space

and the suggestion of space.

And within it, within the studio setting,

the representation of paintings,

at least one of which is melting.

So in a kind of setting where there are just a few elements,

there was this suggestion

that something was happening, I thought.

- While this was going on, Jasper was cooking a fish.

- [Narrator] Sculptor Richard Serra's first commission

came from Johns, who saw a piece he created

at the Whitney Museum by splashing molten lead

against the juncture of a wall and the floor.

Johns invited him to do a similar work in his studio.

- He was also opening his mail

and he was also painting on a painting a target,

a green, purple, and orange target.

And seeing to the daily business of his studio.

At one point, he picked up a ladder

and he walked to the ventilator, the window vent,

climbed up the ladder, opened the window, climbed back down,

put the ladder under his arm,

and started to walk back toward the kitchen.

I asked him how long he had been painting on the painting.

He said, "Eight years."

Then he came back, once again, to deposit something

in an anteroom and I asked if he liked doing that.

And he said, "Which part?"

(eccentric music)

- [Narrator] "Racing Thoughts, 1984".

- I had had a period of kind of anxiety, I suppose,

where I was, when I was trying to go to sleep.

Images and bits of images and bits of thoughts

would run through my head without any connectedness

that I could see.

And

I was having dinner with a, I think a psychologist

that I had met, and I explained that I had been having

this for like a week, this situation.

And he said, "Oh, we call those racing thoughts."

And I was very pleased that there was a name

for my condition.

(frantic music)

(haunting music)

- [Narrator] In 1985, Johns began a series of four paintings

called "The Seasons".

The seasons of the year combined with the seasons

of human life, infancy, youth, maturity, and old age.

The young Johns had said, "I don't want my work

"to be an exposure of my feelings."

The mature artist, looking back,

admits eventually it seemed like a losing battle.

Finally, one must simply drop the reserve.

Full of the accumulation of a lifetime,

the strongest indication of the painting's personal nature

is the appearance of a figure.

Ghostly, cut in two, or fading away

into the ruins of the past.

- [Jasper] Well, they reflect a different kind of rhythm

because they are fairly complicated in terms of imagery.

Suggesting almost a kind of natural abundance of detail.

That they are cyclical in terms of,

you know, in traditional terms.

It gives them a sense of wholeness, I guess.

They have that to a degree that not much

of my work has that.

- [Narrator] The way Johns reworks themes and images

is much more a tradition in printmaking than in painting.

- [Jasper] This one too.

- [Narrator] One talks of the first state of a print,

the second state, and so forth,

with the understanding that printmaking is a process

of refining and redefining images.

Over the years, Johns has created hundreds

of lithographs and etchings that explore the same subjects

and objects as his paintings and sculpture.

(pleasant jazz music)

He has learned to use the unique characteristics

of each medium to its fullest.

Drawing or painting on a smooth limestone

is the basis of lithography.

The surface captures the crayon's rough texture

and the subtle nuances of the artist's ink.

Rich effects can be created

by printing many layers of images.

Almost every major painting has its counterpart

in Johns' prints.

These are the color etchings of "The Seasons".

Then, Johns took the plates used to print the black ink

on the color print and completely reworked

and rearranged them to create a new print.

After the edition of "The Black and White Seasons"

was printed, Johns returned to the plates again

to rework them yet another time.

Three years have now passed since he began working

on these sheets of polished copper.

In etching, the artist uses acid to etch lines and patterns

on a metal plate.

It can also be a very physical process,

sanding and scraping the metal to create

or remove textures and images.

Johns has even punched holes in plates with nail punches.

(soft jazz music)

- I like the idea of just keeping all of the marks

so the history of everything is contained.

- [Narrator] Both etching and lithography

are curiously old-fashioned and low-tech.

It takes a great deal of experience

to make the process work, so even experienced artists

like Johns usually work with master printers.

Although Johns works with others,

he has rarely collaborated with other artists.

In 1983, he created a set of prints and Samuel Beckett

provided the text for the book "Fizzles".

"Words", one of the first prints in the series,

mirrors the overlapping layers of the dense

and obsessive texts.

- [Obsessive Narrator] It was he who wailed.

He who saw the light.

I didn't wail.

I didn't see the light.

It's impossible I should have a voice.

Impossible I should have thoughts.

And I speak and think.

I do think it's possible.

It is not possible otherwise.

It was he who had a life, I didn't have a life.

A life not worth having.

Because of me, he'll do himself to death.

Because of me, I'll tell the tale.

The tale of his death.

The end of his life and his death.

His death alone will not be enough.

It will not be enough for me.

If he rattles, he will rattle, I won't rattle.

(disturbing music) (speaking in foreign language)

- [Obsessive Narrator] If they find him, I'll be inside

and he'll rot, I won't rot.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Obsessive Narrator] It's not possible otherwise

and that's how I see it.

- There always seemed to be another content residing

in the work and I think that's not only still apparent,

but even more so.

Particularly with paintings like "Perilous Night".

I mean, it really gets into the pain beneath the surface,

the scratching on the blackboard.

- [Narrator] In 1943, John Cage wrote a piece of music

called "The Perilous Night".

- The first title for that piece came from an Irish myth.

It's not called "The Perilous Night".

It's called "The Perilous Bed".

And I was at the point of divorce between Xenia Cage

and when I wrote it.

And it was a...

It was the dark side of the erotic.

It presents a situation that is where the extremes

become, well, where things work together,

that they come and go far apart.

- [Narrator] In the legend, the Perilous Bed rested

on a floor of polished jasper.

(haunting piano music)

(gavel banging)

- [Announcer] If I could have your attention,

ladies and gentlemen, please.

Before I begin, I must read the customary announcements.

Bidders are reminded that the--

- [Narrator] Johns' art is immensely valuable.

There is a list of people waiting

to buy anything with his name on it.

Since early in his career, his art has sold

for prices that have broken record after record.

In 1988, "Diver" sold for $4.1 million at auction,

setting a new record for the work of a living artist.

- [Announcer] $3 million.

3,200,000.

- [Narrator] That record stood until November of 1988

when Christie's auctioned "White Flag",

a painting that originally sold for $2,000.

- 4,200,000.

4,500,000.

4,800,000,

4,800,000.

$5 million.

5,200,000.

5,500,000.

5,800,000.

Bid is decide at $5,800,000 against you left.

At five, $6 million on the telephone.

Six million.

What's that two, one.

All right, six million one.

Ahead of your bidder.

I'll take six two.

Six million one is against you in the room

and against the gallery too.

Six million, 100, 6,200,000 on the telephone.

Three, $6,300,000 in the room.

$6,300,000.

Four, 6,400,000 on the telephone.

One more, sir?

Maybe not.

$6,400,000 on the telephone and against your bid

and against the room at $6,400,000.

The telephone bidder against you all in here.

Fair warning at $6,400,000.

(gavel bangs) Telephone bidder.

Six million, four.

- [Narrator] The 10% auction commission

brought the price of the painting

to a little over $7 million.

That record only lasted one day.

The following day this painting, "False Start",

sold for $17 million at another auction at Sotheby's.

- I don't think I fully understand it, the process.

When it begins,

you're pleased that you can make something and sell it.

It allows you to devote yourself to the work

that you want to do.

As it expands, and the value of the work increases,

at a certain point you see that the society takes over

in the determination of the value of the work

and the meaning of the work.

- Scarcity is also something that's very important.

There are not many Jasper Johnses around.

So competition always among collectors

plays an important role.

- Art has taken the place of precious metals in the economy.

And it has never done that to the degree that it has today.

And so you have this extremely distorted point of view.

People are really, they are not talking about art.

They are talking about money.

So to think that they're talking about art is,

I think, the first misconception.

- [Announcer] $900,000.

Fair warning.

Sold for $900,000. (gavel bangs)

You again, sir, 900.

- If you look at it, it just looks like a bunch of marks

all over the place.

But Jasper Johns actually did this very carefully

with a lot of planning.

- If you see something and it intrigues you in any way,

even to the point of horrible irritation,

go back and look at it again.

(chuckles)

Don't worry about being educated.

I think that most of the time gets in the way,

from my point of view.

- I personally think that his work can be fully appreciated

without knowing what the hell it's about at all,

because it's incredibly good painting.

- Faucet. - There's the cast on the arm.

- I'm really impressed.

I like these a lot.

- 'Cause it makes you like imagine stuff.

You could see stuff within paintings.

- I mean, I didn't wanna know too much about the ideas

because I didn't think I would be that interested in them.

But I love the paintings and there was something about them.

- Well, I think they're really interesting

because he takes all different things and puts them together

into one big picture.

- I think he paints as well as he ever painted.

He has that beautiful touch.

But while he has not forgotten how to paint,

in some way he seems to me to have forgotten what to paint.

- I like the way he uses the color

and sort of flashes it together.

- I like the four seasons the best

because he shows like his lifetime and how he goes

and gets older and how he dies.

- I mean, I think Jasper's a fairly conventional person.

And sort of a conventional artist

in the best sense of the word.

Art is about conventions, I guess, in a way,

and then trying to make, expand the conventions

so that they're expressive and that's what he does the best.

- [Jasper] To the degree that I have been influenced

or moved by other people's work, I probably have an idea

that perhaps someone might have that kind of use

for my pictures.

(eccentric music)

- [John] The question of what is entity splitting

on the psychological level.

But also the question of what is the part.

And what the question of what is the part.

And what is a what is a whole is a very ordinary,

infantile level.

Yes, level.

But also in ordinary objective space

is a very interesting problem on the the question

of what is a question of what is a part.

A very part and what is the whole is a very interesting,

a very interesting problem on the psychological level,

but also, but also an ordinary is.