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 SalleWhat 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.
David SalleOnce 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.
David SalleI 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 SalleI 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 SalleThere 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.
David Salle