Jerry Saltz
Jerry Saltz
Jerry Saltzis 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 served as a visiting critic at The School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Yale University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio Residency Program, and was the sole advisor...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth19 March 1951
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.
I like that the art world isn't regulated.
Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.
To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.
The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.
Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.
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.
There are many, many art worlds. Art contains multitudes.
Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. There are ecstasy machines. Follow your eyes to wherever they lead you, stop, get very quiet, and the world should begin to change for you. And if you see me, say something! We can talk about it together.
Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.
Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.
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.