Jerry Saltz Quotes

• The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she doesn’t want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Should, Force

• The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Cooked, Something

• The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes, placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both, and create a third thing.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Intact, Placing

• ‘Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,’ the Whitney Museum’s 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it’ll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Conservative, Moments

• Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Aesthetic, Openings

• Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Hard, Recession

• Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that the Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years?

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Artists, Lasted

• Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Meaning, Anytime

• Poor Georgia O’Keeffe. Death didn’t soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Opinions, Georgia

• Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Viewer, Separately

• Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Museums, Outside

• Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Transforms, Wonderfully

• Only an artist as preternaturally acute and copacetic, as oddly visionary and just odd as Richard Artschwager, would be able to lay out the whole course of human evolution and have it make some kind of sense while also seeming like a dazzling insight.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Visionary, Acute

• One argument goes that recessions are good for female artists because when money flies out the window, women are allowed in the house. The other claims that when money ebbs, so do prospects for women.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Argument, Artists

• Once artists are expected to shock, it’s that much harder for them to do so.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Expected, Harder

• Ofili is still a champion. It would be a huge mistake to think otherwise.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Champion, Still

• Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren’t necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Ethics, Necessarily

• Of all the biennials, triennials, quadrennials, internationals, and massive group shows, Documenta, established in 1955 and held once every five years in Kassel, Germany, is seen as the most serious. A statement show.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Serious, Show

• Now people look at ‘The Scream’ or Van Gogh’s ‘Irises’ or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Equate, Inherently

• Not to say people shouldn’t get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic.

  Jerry Saltz

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  Tags in Adore, Complex

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
• 1866 - Voltairine De Cleyre
• 1755 - Louis XVIII
• 1951 - Stephen Root
• 1960 - Jonathan Ross

Deaths

• 1990 - Robert Hofstadter
• 1995 - Marguerite Young
• 1858 - Robert Owen
• 1983 - Raymond Aron
• 2006 - Ruth Brown