Exhibit B in The Dud Museum

By ROBERT HUGHES

The exhibition of new paintings by David Salle at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan (through May 4) has one tiny merit. It reminds you how lousy and overpromoted so much "hot," "innovative" American art in the 1980s was. If Julian Schnabel is Exhibit A in our national wax museum of recent duds, David Salle is certainly Exhibit B.

In the '80s, Salle became about as successful as a young artist could get, analyzed at length in the art magazines, pursued by bleating flocks of new collectors: "Innaresting, innaresting, Marcia." In 1987, when he was only 34, the Whitney Museum gave him a full-dress retrospective, a striking example of that institution's passive-masochistic relation to the art market.

Yet is there a duller or more formula-ridden artist in America than Salle in 1991, as he approaches the Big Four-Oh? His work, essentially, is a decoction from three other artists. From Robert Rauschenberg's combines of the '50s and his silk-screen "collages" of the early '60s, Salle learned about piling unrelated images onto a canvas, the difference being that Salle hasn't a trace of the lyrical sharpness and poetic force of vintage Rauschenberg. His tone is a supercilious droning, very far from Rauschenberg's enthused, life-enhancing Barbaric Yawp.

From his German contemporary Sigmar Polke -- whose uneven but brilliant retrospective is now finishing its run at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and affords the utmost contrast to the work of his New York imitator -- Salle learned about hand painting his mass-media source images. And from the late paintings of Francis Picabia, he extracted (as Polke did, much more inventively) the banal mannerism of painting figures and things as though they were transparent, drawing them over the top of other things and figures.

One says "drawing" out of force of habit. At any rate, it is done with line. (It has to be, since Salle has no discernible sense of color: his range goes from putty to nasty anilines, but in this show a washed-out gray is the key.) Drawing, as anyone who has seen a few Salles knows, is not what the artist does. He never learned to do it, and probably never will. He is incapable of making an interesting mark. The line has all the verve of chewed string. It starts here and finishes there, but that's all you can say for it: nothing happens along the way. Mostly he traces, from slides projected on the canvas. And he traces very badly, which lends his quotations from Old Master paintings -- thick on the ground in this show -- an irresistibly comic air. If you are going to "appropriate" an image from Durer or Gericault or Tiepolo or even some routine seicento tapestry, and do it by hand, nobody expects you to draw as well as your sources; but it helps if you can at least draw well enough to make the source clear, and Salle can hardly even do that.

The next step is to patch in some disconnected quotes from Modern Life, like a comic-strip balloon, a '30s car, a nude or an outline drawing of a chair. These can be repeated from picture to picture, thus giving the impression that such images are obsessive, a la Jasper Johns. This will lend an expectation of profundity to the series. Why profound? Because Salle, as everyone now knows, has discovered important metaphors of the meaningless overload of images in contemporary life. Thus his pictures enable critics to kvetch soulfully about the dissociation of signs and meanings, and to praise what all good little deconstructors would call their "refusal of authoritarian closure," meaning, roughly, that they don't mean anything in particular. It's as though those who bet on him can't bear to face the possibility that his work was vacuous to begin with, so that the charade of admiring the acuteness of his "strategies" can keep going, despite the quasi-industrial repetitiousness with which he recycles his rather small idea.

The work has changed, a little. Sensitive, no doubt, to the art world's new integument of Political Correctness, Salle has stopped including the mildly pornographic nudes that annoyed some spectators in the '80s. One must content oneself with his equally crude versions of less sexually loaded images. The New York Times, rarely in doubt about Salle's virtues, hailed the new works as "Rococo," presumably because they are all pale, some have harlequins, and one of them recycles a bit of 18th century decor -- figures in a Roman landscape beside the Pyramid of Cestius. Such is the history of style.

Besides, it's all in a kind of museum, if you half-close your eyes. The Gagosian Gallery, perhaps because its ascent from selling posters on the West Coast to flogging $10 million De Koonings has been so short and steep, goes to great lengths to surround its wares with the aura of a museum rather than that of a shop. It has even hired a guard to stand at the entrance to the room in which Salle's six new paintings are displayed, presumably in case some collector from the bottom of the waiting list is seized by the impulse to grab one of these tallowy objects from the wall and make a run for it. Ten minutes into the show, your heart goes out to that guard. Eight hours a day, five days a week, of this!