Jerry Saltz Quotes

• John Currin’s exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance, never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Realism, Sincere

• Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he’s the biggest, best, or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he’s the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you’re talking about the wonderful, wicked, lovable, and annoying creatures known as art dealers).

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lovable, Wicked, Realism

• It’s great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Oppressive, Immaculate

• It’s art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn’t about progress, and wants to – as Walt Whitman put it – ‘contain multitudes.’

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Multitudes, Decay

• It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn’t own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself – a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha – to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Museum, Metropolitan

• It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino’s work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Romantic, Abstraction

• In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Watergate, Reproduction

• It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He’s the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Modern, Invented

• In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Strangers, Photographs

• In some ways Lawler is a conceptual Diane Arbus. She’s a stalker who takes advantage of situations. She pulls back curtains, causing normal things to look freakish and the freakish to turn mundane.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pulls, Situations

• In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don’t know what we’re seeing, we overreact.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Narrative, Scandal, Rather

• Imagine it’s 1981. You’re an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You’re also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to; art history just isn’t that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Imagine

• In 1998, Artnet was the site that convinced me that if my writing didn’t exist online, it didn’t exist at all. It showed me criticism’s future.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Showed, Exist

• If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn’t too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Annoying, Importantly

• If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Months, Observe

• I’m noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum’s ‘Younger Than Jesus’ last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I’m seeing it blossom and bear fruit at ‘Greater New York,’ MoMA P.S. 1’s twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Museum, Gallery

• I’ve always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Critic, Aside

• I’m not for or against video – or any medium or style, for that matter.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Video, Style

• I wish I could write about shows outside New York. I often feel like the last person to know anything, because I almost never get to leave town, and when I do, I tend to go for three days max. Seeing between 30 and 40 shows a week in 100 or so galleries and museums takes up nearly all my time.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Week, Outside

• I see around 100 shows a month, going from Niketown-size palaces where you feel like yelling, to storefronts in Bushwick. Each has to pay the bills; keep artists happy; and cope with collectors (oy!), curators (ay-yi-yi), critics (woo-hoo!), and occasionally plumbers. That their fiscal life often hangs in the balance only adds to the energy.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Critics, Each

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 - 9th January

Births

• 1881 - Lascelles Abercrombie
• 1856 - Lizette Woodworth Reese
• 1890 - Karel Capek
• 1939 - Susannah York
• 1932 - Robert Patrick Casey Sr.

Deaths

• 1985 - Robert Mayer
• 1986 - Michel de Certeau
• 1865 - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
• 1886 - Aaron Anderson
• 1998 - Kenichi Fukui