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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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David Salle
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: September 28
Drawer
Film Director
Painter
Photographer
Norman
Oklahoma
Mistake
Art
Work
Things
People

More quotes by 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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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
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My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.
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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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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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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The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.
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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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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For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.
David Salle
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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
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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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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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I'm happiest when I feel that several almost opposing sensations are present at the same time.
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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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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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
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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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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
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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