Latest David Salle Quotes from Interviews

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• 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

• People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That's something that's part of us.

  David Salle

  People, World, Painting

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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

• If you go to a concert, you will notice, is it loud? Is the music fast? Is it predominately strings or brass? There are things we can all register, whether we are musicians or not. Painting's no different. Taking pleasure in projecting oneself into the painting is the act of looking. That's what looking is.

  David Salle

  Musician, Different, Painting

  Source: www.pbs.org

• What most paintings do is give you a path for your eye to move around. The painting actually tells your eye, go here, now go here, now go here, go here. So all you have to do is look at it, give it a few seconds, and your eye will start to move through the painting.

  David Salle

  Moving, Eye, Giving

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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

• I do work hard at trying to find the right expression for something, which might be like finding the right image - choosing not only the right words but down to the right number of lines. I remember being in Maine once at Colby College with Alex Katz. It houses hundreds of his works. There was a painting of just one seagull against a blue sky. I was admiring it and Alex said, "45 brush strokes exactly."

  David Salle

  Hard Work, College, House

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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 very fortunate to have known James Salter, not very well, but I knew him over the years. Always, people would be talking, talking, talking, and after digging themselves into a deep enough hole, they would turn to Jim and wait for him to utter the single clarifying sentence.

  David Salle

  People, Waiting, Enough

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you just like people, and it grows out like a nautilus shell.

  David Salle

  People, Lucky, Extraordinary

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I have to say, that's pretty typical for artists, kind of embarrassingly typical for artists that everything is all about selection.

  David Salle

  Artist, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I'm always very grateful for stories about the great coffeehouse wits in Vienna at the turn of the last century. People would wait for a chance to stand near the table where the great wits were trading witticisms as a spectator sport because it was that good. They were that on fire and there was no product. They didn't write anything down. It was just the pleasure of engagement with the moment. I think that's my kind of ideal of how I live.

  David Salle

  Sports, Grateful, Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think it's what any artist would want: to feel like their work can be taken in on a level of experience beyond the headline or the press release. I don't think any artist wants to be reduced to a press release. We have a whole industry whose function it is to process and present information. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not the thing.

  David Salle

  Taken, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I feel like it's not so much a tradition as a system that has been codified over the centuries starting in the Renaissance that applies to any painted surface. So if you're engaging in paintings, this is the language that one has to learn and is obliged to speak. I was very fortunate that I learned this language when I was a kid before I went to California, where I learned the language of attitude. Somehow the two things began to coexist.

  David Salle

  Attitude, Kids, Painting

  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

• There were successful ways of expressing the attitude and less successful ways. I think that spirit is very much alive today actually. That's what a certain generation of curators is alert to or on the look out for: an attitude. And it is a brilliant and moving spectacle when it happens. That suspension of disbelief is something that we all respond to. But it's hard to capture the butterfly without tearing the wings off of it.

  David Salle

  Attitude, Moving, Butterfly

  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

• 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 was actually dumbfounded by how some artists talked to each other. For example, it was a normal night at a bar, nothing very momentous, when in walked a painter. The other painters at the bar had a bit of an attitude about it. One said to him, "You know, I'm tired of that feeling of hot air coming out from behind your work." And I thought, "Well, that's interesting." I didn't know you could even think something like that, let alone say it right to someone's face.

  David Salle

  Attitude, Tired, Artist

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

• I was in a group show at a museum in Torino, a lot of American artists installed in a floor of this museum. Another floor of the museum houses the most refined collection of arte povera in the world, which is perfectly selected and perfectly installed. I remember being struck by the contrast between the Italian works and the American. I would say the hallmarks of the Italian style are a poetical connection to nature and to materiality, materials, and exquisite taste. On contrast, the American work was essentially a bunch of bad-tempered, complaining kids.

  David Salle

  Kids, Artist, Italian

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I feel like all the American artists are aesthetically not very interesting and mired in a complaining relationship to its own culture, whereas the Italian work, from a different era, is so comfortable with its relationship to nature and to culture.

  David Salle

  Artist, Italian, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• What if everything in a museum is crap? It's entirely possible; it's not the end of the world.

  David Salle

  What If, World, End Of The World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.

  David Salle

  Mean, Thinking, People

  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