How to See Quotes

“The late sculptor Ken Price put it best: “Nothing I can say is going to improve how it looks.”
― David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

“The most convincing works tend to be those in which the thinking is inseparable from the doing.”
― David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

“Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both direct and associative, and has a grammar and syntax like any other human communication. The act of paying close attention to what someone made, in all of its particulars, is what stimulates an authentic, as opposed to a conditioned, response.”
― David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

“How a painter treats this edge is the real subject of realist painting; how the brush behaves in the vicinity of an edge gives a painting its present-tenseness, the feeling of the eternal present.”
― David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

“One way to look at a painting—and I use that word as shorthand for visual art in general—is to notice as you take its measure what it is you actually find yourself thinking about, which may differ from what you imagine you’re supposed to be thinking about.”
― David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

“good art illustrates anything at all, it’s likely to be a story you didn’t even know needed telling.”
― David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

“The right idea, one that is in productive sync with one’s talents, can unlock a whole worldview. If that idea is also part of a sensibility that is forming and spreading in the larger culture, or zeitgeist, a multiplier effect comes into play, and the art will resonate strongly with the viewing public. We will feel that it expresses us.”
― David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

“Artists, on the other hand, talk to determine what works, what does not, and why. Their focus is more on the micro; it moves from the inside out.”
― David Salle, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art