David Salle Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• It's a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people.

  David Salle

  Art, Mistake, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Truth is, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I got out of Cal Arts. I think I wasted a lot of time not being bold enough, or still engaged in the questioning that you get into at school.

  David Salle

  Art, School, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• There are so many different ways to talk and think about art. We just spoke about when attitude becomes form. But when I was a kid, I had these two art teachers, a couple, who were continuing a line of very classical, atelier art training, and they instilled in me a sensitivity to all the classical verities of line, shape, color, texture, and composition, which is only engaging if you're making two-dimensional objects.

  David Salle

  Teacher, Art, Attitude

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

  David Salle

  Art, Fall, Bed

  Interview with David Salle, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 9, 2013.

• I have a terrible confession to make, sort of like those people who say that they've been mispronouncing a word all their life: I've never read Ways of Seeing all the way through. I'm sure I carried it around with me in art school.

  David Salle

  Art, School, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.

  David Salle

  Art, Live Life, Imagination

• Art is something someone made. It's a product of human endeavor. As such, it's not that different from having a conversation with someone. The painter is telling us something. Just, how do they - what's their syntax? What's their inflection?

  David Salle

  Art, Different, Painter

  Source: www.pbs.org

• People talk about this often in the art world. The press releases have reached a level of absurdity and creativity - creative absurdity - that has completely detached from its intended object. It's left reality behind long ago. It's like something out of William Burroughs.

  David Salle

  Art, Creativity, Reality

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Fairfield Porter who has been my model for art writing all along, said that if the most interesting thing about a work of art is its content, it's probably a failure. I think it's true that if you find yourself thinking about the meaning in an author's message, it's probably not very interesting as art. Obviously, this is a tough concept, because if you withdraw intention.

  David Salle

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think a good painting or a good work of art does many things it wants, I mean, maybe 15 or 20 or 100. One of the things a painting does is to make the room look better. It improves the wall that it's on. Which is much harder than it looks. And that's a good thing. And if one engages with a painting on that level, that's fine, that's great. After some time, familiarity, the other things that a painting does, the other layers, they just start to make themselves felt.

  David Salle

  Art, Wall, Mean

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Artists talk about art in sort of straightforward terms, more like the way you talk about plumbing fixtures. Does it function well? Does it bring the hot water up from the cellar efficiently, or does it lose too much thermodynamic energy in the process? Artists are also very ruthless with each other and can be very brutal in evaluating each other's work because their criteria is almost more mechanistic. Does it do what it's supposed to be doing in an efficient way? That doesn't mean that intention is not part of the conversation, but it's not the foreground.

  David Salle

  Art, Mean, Water

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• When I first came to New York, I knew some painters older than myself. I was kind of the kid who was allowed to hang out with them. That is more the way people talked in those days, it was perfectly normal to question a work's fundamental premises and its fundamental visual manifestations. It was perfectly okay to say, "Oh, that should have been red" or something like that. In a funny way, the way artists talk about art is to de-privilege it.

  David Salle

  Art, Kids, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years.

  David Salle

  Art, Holiday, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• There was a review by Fairfield Porter from the 1950s about Mark Rothko, one of the more hallowed names in American art. Porter says something like, "Yeah, Rothko paints rectangles of color. They have mass but no weight." That's not in any way a detraction, but it's a description. And it has nothing to do with the spiritual dimension. The main thing is as an intelligent viewer, to identify just what those things are that it does, that those rectangles do, and then not assume that they do these things over here. I don't know why that's challenging.

  David Salle

  Spiritual, Art, Intelligent

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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