Top David Salle Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

David Salle Biography

David Salle (born 1952) is an American painter, printmaker, and stage designer who helped define postmodern sensibility. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California where he studied with John Baldessari. Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York in the early 1980s.

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David Salle Quotes

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.

Established, Looks, Style, Successful, Time

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.

Actors, Comedian, Comedians, Comic, Eyebrow, Eyebrows

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.

Feelings, Moral, Serious, Serious Subjects, Stylistic, Work

I remember making a videotape in a fancy hair salon in Beverly Hills. The soundtrack in the salon had a whole worldview behind it - I was interested in things like that.

Beverly, Beverly Hills, Fancy, Hair, Like, Soundtrack

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.

Art, Came, Hang, Kids, People, Red

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?

Art, Different, Painter, Product, Syntax

The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.

Done, Originality, Thing, Worth

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

Being In Love, Love, Love Is, Talk, Thinking

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.

Art, Message, Porter, Said, Thinking, Writing

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.

Becomes, Moving, People, Probably, Space, Suffering

I did all the stuff that people do - film, performance, photography, pictures and words, words and pictures. In retrospect, I was trying to find some way to put things - meaning images and forms - together that highlighted some idea of what was underneath the surface of an image, what determined how something was seen.

Film, Ideas, Images, People, Photography, Retrospect

Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.

Connections, Fluidity, Image, Painting, Simultaneity

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.

Art, Bold, Questioning, School, Thinking

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.

Bring, Dialogue, Painting, People, Way, World

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.

Art, Confession, People, School, Sort, Terrible

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.

Art, Dimension, Intelligent, Mark, Spiritual

Spend a day talking only in rhyme.

Day, Rhyme, Spend, Talking

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.

Addresses, Demand, Demands, Painting, Running, Sort

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.

Attitude, Butterfly, Moving, Successful

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.

Art, Holiday, Painting, Stuff, Years

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