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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

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David Salle
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: September 28
Drawer
Film Director
Painter
Photographer
Norman
Oklahoma
Thing
Wave
Really
Matters
Life
Imagination
Art
Literalism
Live
Tidal
Matter
Mindedness
Feel
Literal
Feels
Insist

More quotes by David Salle

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My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.
David Salle
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It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the idea of the thing - the space between the two.
David Salle
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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
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What if everything in a museum is crap? It's entirely possible it's not the end of the world.
David Salle
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Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.
David Salle
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Spend a day talking only in rhyme.
David Salle
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It's a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people.
David Salle
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This is a little off subject, but I'm interested in those cases where someone is barking up the wrong tree, or misapplying their talent.
David Salle
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For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.
David Salle
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.
David Salle
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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.
David Salle
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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
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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
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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
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I'm happiest when I feel that several almost opposing sensations are present at the same time.
David Salle
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The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.
David Salle