David Salle Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.

  David Salle

  Being In Love, Love Is, Thinking

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I'm happiest when I feel that several almost opposing sensations are present at the same time.

  David Salle

  Feels, Opposing, Sensations

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I started when I was nine. Really, everything I know about color theory, composition, drawing, and painting, I learned when I was a kid.

  David Salle

  Kids, Color, Drawing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  5 Copy quote

• Once established, a successful style looks like an inevitability - maybe that's the definition of a successful style - but there's often the time when it looks like anything but.

  David Salle

  Successful, Style, Looks

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

  7 Copy quote

• To know how to structure the joke perfectly so that the narrative information is given in the right tempo, in just the right dose - it sometimes takes quite a lot of work. It seems easy when you hear the joke.

  David Salle

  Narrative, Information, Sometimes

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

  6 Copy quote

• My father had wanted to be a commercial artist. He got as far as being a photographer in the army in World War II, but he was always a Sunday painter. At a certain point, he gave me his oil paints and I messed around with them, having no idea what I was doing.

  David Salle

  Father, War, Sunday

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it's funny.

  David Salle

  Eyebrows, Comedian, Actors

  7 Copy quote

• If my work is pornography, so what? I don't have any moral compunction about pornography. Any feelings I have about it are purely stylistic... I don't see why it should be excluded as a serious subject.

  David Salle

  Feelings, Serious Subjects, Moral

  7 Copy quote

• As a young person, you have no fixed address, no studio, no money for materials, so I made things sort of on the run. That life doesn't favor the stability and spatial demands of painting.

  David Salle

  Running, Demand, Addresses

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• Since I moved six or seven times the first year I was in New York, I had to be able to roll up the work, and paper would just get destroyed. Once I looked at what I'd done, I realized I had made a painting, sort of by default.

  David Salle

  New York, Years, Done

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Really it becomes a question of architecture. How do you move people through a space and allow them to have an experience? I, probably more than most people, suffer from museum fatigue. I always want to just stay still or sit in a chair and look at one thing, but that's not the experience of the museum.

  David Salle

  Moving, People, Suffering

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

Page 2 of 3

First

← Prev

1

2

3

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin