YouSaid · the spoken record

David Salle

lines on the record: 55
first: 2021-11-03
most recent: 2021-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm sure it's quite difficult to do it well. There's an obvious problem in writing about art. Art is visual. Language is language. When we write about literature or sociology or something other than music, the medium with which we used to describe it is somehow aligned with the experience of it in the first place. And with a painting or a sculpture, when I say painting, I mean visual arts generally, there is always an approximation or translation that is challenging. To do it well is challenging.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's another level and doesn't have to be apparent in the same way that it's decorative value is apparent. What else does it do? It locates the maker in a certain history, certain dialogues, certain discourse. It sometimes takes sides. It sometimes provokes arguments. So these are other things the paintings can do. Maybe 15 is a slight exaggeration.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people might underestimate the decorative function of painting. Painting has various functions, good painting satisfies most of them, or all of them pretty much at a high level. One of the functions historically is to make the room look better, to make people's emotional temperature quicken slightly when the paintings in the room as opposed to when it's not in the room. That's a decorative function, and it's an important one. I remember the first time I met Jasper Johns, he actually said to a friend of mine who was standing with us that the first obligation of a painting is to make the wall look better, that it's hanging on. It is one of those statements that is so simple-minded books, mystification, but it's just a simple fact. What else does painting do? Obviously, we wanted to do more than just be decorative. I think any good painting, I mean, really good painting, expresses something true about the time in which it was made and about the maker.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally, is there to be no metaphor? Is there to be no invention? What I meant in that statement is essentially let's have more fun and let's use more imagination.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of true. What does it mean? It's certainly nothing particular to me, or rather not only to me. However, I feel that, starting from when, I don't know, from the 50s or the 60s or 70s, at a certain point, the experience of culture, whether it's painting or something else, the nature of the experience shifted to something that had more in common with journalism than with what we might have called the quote-unquote aesthetic experience, that works of art were thought to be about something and what that about was or is is something that could be more or less easily grasped. It's the aboutness which for me as a kind of short circuiting of the art experience. So when I say what I'm opposed to is where I find myself in opposition to is literal-mindedness, what I mean is just that. Let's not be so literal. Let's not take it so everything's so literal.”
2021-11-03 · Conversations with Tyler · David Salle on the Experience of Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source