David Salle Quotes

United States, Painter
September 28, 1952

David Salle is an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York. 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.

Also known as Printmaker, Photographer, Designer

What most paintings do is give you a path for your eye to move around. The painting actually tells your eye, go here, now go here, now go here, go here. So all you have to do is look at it, give it a few seconds, and your eye will start to move through the painting.

David Salle
- Path
- Painting
- Start
The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.

David Salle
- Doing
- Before

I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.

David Salle
- People
- Thinking
- Mean
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
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
For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

David Salle
- History
- Like
- Catches
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
- Imagination
- Feels
- Matter
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

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
- Life
- Thinking
- Facts
It's a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people.

David Salle
- People
- Things
- Mistake