David Salle Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.

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.

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.

For me, art history is like a feather bed – you fall into it and it catches you.

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