Top 160 Jerry Saltz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Jerry Saltz

2. “The secret of food lies in memory – of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.”

— Jerry Saltz

3. “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

4. “Turns out Picasso’s passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.”

— Jerry Saltz

5. “Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.”

— Jerry Saltz

6. “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

7. “There are many, many art worlds. Art contains multitudes.”

— Jerry Saltz

8. “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

9. “Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn’t disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn’t.”

— Jerry Saltz

10. “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

11. “Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.”

— Jerry Saltz

12. “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.”

— Jerry Saltz

13. “Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect.”

— Jerry Saltz

14. “Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.”

— Jerry Saltz

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be.”

— Jerry Saltz

19. “The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years.”

— Jerry Saltz

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I’ve ever seen them before.”

— Jerry Saltz

24. “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

25. “Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.”

— Jerry Saltz

26. “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

27. “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

28. “The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer’s journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It’s not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive.”

— Jerry Saltz

29. “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

30. “Photography is the easiest thing to make, and one of the hardest things to make well.”

— Jerry Saltz

31. “The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city’s magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.”

— Jerry Saltz

32. “Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I’ve never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.”

— Jerry Saltz

33. “When art wins, everyone wins.”

— Jerry Saltz

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.’”

— Jerry Saltz

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Money is something that can be measured; art is not. It’s all subjective.”

— Jerry Saltz

46. “Kinkade’s paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I’d love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade’s work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.”

— Jerry Saltz

47. “Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.”

— Jerry Saltz

48. “I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.”

— Jerry Saltz

49. “To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of ‘disinterest’ strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.”

— Jerry Saltz

50. “When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won’t miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the ‘Eventocracy.’ All this flashy ‘art-fair art’ and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.”

— Jerry Saltz