Top 100 Jerry Saltz Quotes
#1. Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be.
Jerry Saltz
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
Jerry Saltz
#5. I love art dealers. In some ways, they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is, create their own aesthetic universes, support artists, employ people, and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.
Jerry Saltz
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. After too much art that made too much sense, artists are operating blind again. They're more interested in the possible than the probable, the private that speaks publicly rather than the public with no private side at all.
Jerry Saltz
#12. Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries.
Jerry Saltz
#13. A great artist has a unique vision ... obsession. They are someone willing to fail flamboyantly.
Jerry Saltz
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Many art-worlders have an if-you-say-so approach to art: Everyone is so scared of missing out on the next hot artist that it's never clear whether people are liking work because they like it or because other people do. Everyone is keeping up with the Joneses, and there are more Joneses than ever.
Jerry Saltz
#17. I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.
Jerry Saltz
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.
Jerry Saltz
#21. 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
#22. All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places.
Jerry Saltz
#23. 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
#24. Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect.
Jerry Saltz
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I like that the art world isn't regulated.
Jerry Saltz
#29. I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.
Jerry Saltz
#30. 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
#31. I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.
Jerry Saltz
#32. Certainty sees things in restrictive, protective, aggressive ways, and thus isn't seeing at all.
Jerry Saltz
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I know it's dangerous to take on bloggers. They can go after you every day, all day long, and anonymous people can chime in, too.
Jerry Saltz
#36. 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
#37. Galleries began growing in both number and size in the late seventies, when artists who worked in lofts wanted to exhibit their work in spaces similar to the ones the art was made in.
Jerry Saltz
#38. 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
#40. Auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theatre and burlesque ... a lot of people are going to be making a lot of excuses or maintaining that they were never part of this.
Jerry Saltz
#41. To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously.
Jerry Saltz
#42. I have never really cooked, don't know how to use my dishwasher, and subsist mainly on prepared deli takeout. I don't even eat in restaurants much.
Jerry Saltz
#43. Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.
Jerry Saltz
#44. The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.
Jerry Saltz
#45. 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
#46. Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.
Jerry Saltz
#47. 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
#48. I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.
Jerry Saltz
#49. 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
#50. The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor.
Jerry Saltz
#51. Nearly a half-century on from feminism, simply being a woman artist is still a revolutionary act. And getting one's work shown continues to be met by enormous inbuilt resistance.
Jerry Saltz
#52. Turns out Picasso's passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.
Jerry Saltz
#53. Mark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.
Jerry Saltz
#54. 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
#55. My culture-deprived, aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it.
Jerry Saltz
#56. New Yorkers only cross water for visual culture if the water is an ocean. The East River throws us for a huge loop. If we started going to Queens and the Bronx for visual culture, many of our rent, space, and crowding problems would be over indefinitely.
Jerry Saltz
#57. 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
#58. I'm not for or against video - or any medium or style, for that matter.
Jerry Saltz
#59. Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.
Jerry Saltz
#60. 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
#61. I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week, and no matter what kind of mood I'm in, no matter how bad the art is, I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.
Jerry Saltz
#62. 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
#63. Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.
Jerry Saltz
#64. 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
#65. First let me report that the art in the Barnes Collection has never looked better. My trips to the old Barnes were always amazing, but except on the sunniest days, you could barely see the art. The building always felt pushed beyond its capacity.
Jerry Saltz
#66. In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
Jerry Saltz
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.
Jerry Saltz
#70. 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
#71. Many things happened in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more 'political' than today. It's time to turn the page.
Jerry Saltz
#72. Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
Jerry Saltz
#73. Maybe the museum [of Arts and Design ]needs to follow the advice of its acronym and not be afraid to go a little M.A.D.
Jerry Saltz
#74. 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
#75. Ofili is still a champion. It would be a huge mistake to think otherwise.
Jerry Saltz
#76. Make an enemy of jealousy and envy. As fast and soon as you can ... . The art world is high school with money.
Jerry Saltz
#77. Once artists are expected to shock, it's that much harder for them to do so.
Jerry Saltz
#78. Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.
Jerry Saltz
#79. Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.
Jerry Saltz
#80. 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
#81. A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.
Jerry Saltz
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. My nominee for Best Picture of the year - maybe the best picture ever, because it's essentially made up of and is an ecstatic love letter to all other movies - is Christian Marclay's endlessly enticing must-see masterpiece 'The Clock.'
Jerry Saltz
#85. Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise - all are now the norm, often edging out much else.
Jerry Saltz
#86. 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
#87. Koons's work has always stood apart for its one-at-a-time perfection, epic theatricality, a corrupted, almost sick drive for purification, and an obsession with traditional artistic values.
Jerry Saltz
#88. I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices, and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jerry Saltz
#89. John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.
Jerry Saltz
#90. Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.
Jerry Saltz
#91. Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.
Jerry Saltz
#92. Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.
Jerry Saltz
#93. 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
#94. Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.
Jerry Saltz
#95. 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
#96. A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.
Jerry Saltz
#97. A lot of people still think caring about clothes is a dubious, unserious, frivolous, girlie thing.
Jerry Saltz
#98. More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.
Jerry Saltz
#99. Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.
Jerry Saltz
#100. Lucian Freud's career affirms that the only thing an artist can do is remain true to whatever vision, (lack of) talent, or ideas that happened to pick them in order to be made known to the world.
Jerry Saltz
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