Jerry Saltz Quotes

• Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ordinary, Strange

• Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants, and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Handful, Opinions

• Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a ‘Greatest Generation’ of artists, but if we’re going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Loathe, Applied

• Every artist will one day face the moment when he or she is doing what he or she does after the style has passed and the art-world heat-seeking machine has moved on.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Artist, Passed

• Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Portraits, Dazzling

• Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art’s version of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Relativity, Abstraction

• Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Elvis

• Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher’s stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Overlooked, Along

• Contrary to popular opinion, things don’t go stale particularly fast in the art world.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fast, Popular

• Chris Ofili’s suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Dots, Cave

• Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Industrial, Galleries

• Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into a new kind of artist-photographer of modern life.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Photographer

• Calling a young artist ‘great’ these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Calling, Artist

• Biennial culture is already almost irrelevant, because so many more people are providing so many better opportunities for artists to exhibit their work.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Irrelevant, Exhibit

• Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they’re doing it?

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cosmic, Perplexed

• Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery, works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Exactly, Rigged

• As I went through ‘This Progress,’ one of two performance pieces by Tino Sehgal that transform Frank Lloyd Wright’s emptied-out spiral into a dreamy Socratic-purgatorial journey, the museum literally fell away. I was suspended in some weird nonspace.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Museum, Spiral

• As I made my way through ‘On Line,’ the austere, stridently dogmatic, sometimes revelatory exhibition ‘about line’ at MoMA, I found myself thinking, ‘Someone please wake me when the seventies are over!’ In the empire of curators, the sun never sets on the seventies. It is the undead decade.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Austere, Please

• Artschwager’s art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you’re looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Unexpected, Object

• Artists working for other artists is all about knowing, learning, unlearning, initiating long-term artistic dialogues, making connections, creating covens, and getting temporary shelter from the storm.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Connections, Temporary

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 - 10th January

Births

• 1963 - Mark Lunsford Pryor
• 1936 - Robert Woodrow Wilson
• 1936 - Al Goldstein
• 1936 - Stephen E. Ambrose
• 1934 - Leonard Boswell

Deaths

• 1955 - Joseph Martin McCabe
• 1951 - Sinclair Lewis
• 1654 - Nicholas Culpeper
• 1982 - Paul Lynde
• 1784 - George Savile