I loved this book! Salle, an accomplished artist, has collected essays written for the Paris Review, ArtForum, and Art News along with several previously unpublished lectures and turned out a terrific book about contemporary art. In 30 chapters, he discusses individual artists, solo and group shows, museum exhibits, and the practice of art in language that is both clear and sophisticated. This is a book that should be in the curriculum for all college courses on contemporary art. His themes of the importance of painting, the how as well as the what of art, the role of historical influences, the impact of the popular and the contemporary art market, the ‘inside energy of a painting’, and the physical act of brushwork and the arm are distributed throughout the essays as we meet Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Amy Sillman, Mike Kelley, Uri Fischer, Wade Guyton, Christopher Wool, Robert Gober, Dana Shutz, Roy Lichtenstein, and others, most importantly, his mentor John Baldessari. Love the quote: “Good art is like an eclipse; it blots out everything around it so that you see only what it wants you to.”This is a fine book for an art lover’s library.