Jerry Saltz Quotes

• Those who love him love that he sells the most art; they take it as a point of faith that this proves Kinkade is the best. But his fans don’t only rely on this supply-and-demand justification. They go back to values.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Justification, Point

• Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief – a thing, not a picture.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Abstract, Relief

• These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I’m a flesh-eating virus.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Virus, Around

• There’s one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. ‘The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963’ consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Driving, Los Angeles

• The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Paradigm, Revolution

• The secret of food lies in memory – of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Taste, Secret

• The reason the art world doesn’t respond to Kinkade is because none – not one – of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They’re all cliche and already told.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Touch, Skill

• The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Existential, Level

• ‘The Panorama’ is also the last place anywhere in New York where the World Trade Center still stands, whole, as it stood in the early morning of September 11. I can also see the corner where I saw the first tower fall and howled out loud. Seeing the buildings again here is uplifting, healing.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Seeing, Corner

• ‘The Night Cafe’ and ‘The Starry Night’ still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Dynamic

• The New York gallery scene being as incredibly overpopulated and overmoneyed as it is, deep conflicts and contradictions aren’t hard to find.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Contradictions, New York

• The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we’re not pure enough, good omens appear.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Stink, Critics

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I’ve ever seen them before.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Constantly, Museum

• The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Museum, Finest

• The last time money left the art world, intrepid types maxed out their credit cards and opened galleries, and a few of them have become the best in the world.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Cards, Opened

• The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city’s magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Majesty, Distilled

• The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer’s journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It’s not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Rhythms, Openness

• The German ueber-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Artist, Perfect

• The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Seventies, Periods

• The art world is molting – some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Museums, Closing

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

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Deaths

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