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 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

live-life imagination art

It's a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people.

David Salle

mistake people art

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

painter different art

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

eye giving moving

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.

David Salle

attitude teacher art

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

David Salle

originality done

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

fluidity painting connections

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

mean people thinking

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

normal views thinking

Spend a day talking only in rhyme.

David Salle

rhyme talking

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

photography people ideas

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

painting people world

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

David Salle

bed art fall

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.

David Salle

water mean art

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.

David Salle

art school thinking

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

extraordinary lucky people

People tend to remember and mentally classify work according to how it looks, sometimes oblivious to the underlying intent.

David Salle

remember people looks

My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.

David Salle

imagery focus

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

talent tree littles

I'm always very grateful for stories about the great coffeehouse wits in Vienna at the turn of the last century. People would wait for a chance to stand near the table where the great wits were trading witticisms as a spectator sport because it was that good. They were that on fire and there was no product. They didn't write anything down. It was just the pleasure of engagement with the moment. I think that's my kind of ideal of how I live.

David Salle

grateful writing sports