Jerry Saltz Quotes

• There’s something pleasing about large, well-lit spaces. I love that dealers are willing to take massive chances in order to give this much room to their artists. Most of all, I love that more galleries showing more art gives more artists a shot.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Galleries, Shot

• You can’t prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell – although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I’d say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn’t really looked at either painter’s work. Taste is a blood sport.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Complexity, Prove

• Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn’t any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fantastically

• Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Gallery, Works

• Wolfgang Tillman’s stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Art

  Tags in First Time, Large-Scale

• Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reaching, Abstraction

• While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It’s not a movement – movements are more sure of themselves. It’s a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Aesthetic, Shift

• Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. ‘The Water Lilies’ give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Speed, Portrayed

• When the purse strings tighten up at museums, the institutions usually cut back and cancel shows. That’s exactly the wrong reaction. In fact, now is a good time for them to loosen up – a chance to breathe and experiment a little – and go for the juicy solution lurking in their own basements.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Strings, Museums

• When people in stadiums do the Wave, it’s the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Organism, Rhythms

• When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days – museums have to bring in money – but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Directors, Built

• When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won’t miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the ‘Eventocracy.’ All this flashy ‘art-fair art’ and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hype, Recedes

• When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Opinions, Artists

• We’re all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave, and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We’re also allowed to change or modify our opinions.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Entitled, Opinions

• Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Floating, Venice

• Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown’s gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Digging, Gallery

• ‘Untitled’ is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Combining

• Turns out Picasso’s passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thrill, Uncertainty

• Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cult, Transforming

• To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of ‘disinterest’ strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Neutral, Uninteresting

Jerry Saltz (168)

Birth:	1951
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Journalist

About

Jerry Saltz was born in Illinois, USA. He is an American art critic. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and columnist for New York magazine. Formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice, he has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times. He has also contributed to Art in America, Flash Art International, Frieze, Modern Painters, among various other art publications. He served as a visiting critic at The School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Yale University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He served as a judge in the Bravo television series Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. He has written several books include: Beyond Boundaries (with Roberta Smith), Seeing Out Loud, Seeing Out Louder, Contemporary Art in North America (with Ken Lum).

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Today's Anniversary - 17th November

Births

• 1964 - Susan Rice
• 1958 - Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
• 1937 - Peter Edward Cook
• 1902 - Eugene Wigner
• 1901 - Lee Strasberg

Deaths

• 1968 - Mervyn Peake
• 1995 - Marguerite Young
• 1988 - Sheilah Graham
• 2003 - Don Gibson
• 1990 - Robert Hofstadter