Top 160 Jerry Saltz Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “When the purse strings tighten up at museums, the institutions usually cut back and cancel shows. That’s exactly the wrong reaction. In fact, now is a good time for them to loosen up – a chance to breathe and experiment a little – and go for the juicy solution lurking in their own basements.”

— Jerry Saltz

52. “The last time money left the art world, intrepid types maxed out their credit cards and opened galleries, and a few of them have become the best in the world.”

— Jerry Saltz

53. “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

54. “Giorgio Morandi’s paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.”

— Jerry Saltz

55. “Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.”

— Jerry Saltz

56. “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

57. “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

58. “All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy.”

— Jerry Saltz

59. “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

60. “Don’t talk. I can’t hear myself see.”

— Jerry Saltz

61. “Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief – a thing, not a picture.”

— Jerry Saltz

62. “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

63. “Although I adore the Italian High Renaissance, I’d rather look at Mannerism. The former is ordered, integrated, otherworldly, and grandiose; it leaves you feeling hungry for something flawed and of-the-flesh.”

— Jerry Saltz

64. “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

65. “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

66. “I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.”

— Jerry Saltz

67. “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

68. “I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.”

— Jerry Saltz

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Jerry Saltz

72. “Certainty sees things in restrictive, protective, aggressive ways, and thus isn’t seeing at all.”

— Jerry Saltz

73. “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

74. “I like that the art world isn’t regulated.”

— Jerry Saltz

75. “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

76. “The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor.”

— Jerry Saltz

77. “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

78. “After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades – even if it’s now close to aesthetic kudzu.”

— Jerry Saltz

79. “The art world is molting – some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.”

— Jerry Saltz

80. “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

81. “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

82. “Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession.”

— Jerry Saltz

83. “Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.”

— Jerry Saltz

84. “I am all for art’s finding a large audience. But the way that’s happening now, with big works filling big galleries and bigger shows, is mostly stopping statements from being made. Or heard. Or talked about. Or really examined. It’s watering things down.”

— Jerry Saltz

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Jerry Saltz

89. “Those who love him love that he sells the most art; they take it as a point of faith that this proves Kinkade is the best. But his fans don’t only rely on this supply-and-demand justification. They go back to values.”

— Jerry Saltz

90. “Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.”

— Jerry Saltz

91. “A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.”

— Jerry Saltz

92. “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

93. “Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.”

— Jerry Saltz

94. “Once artists are expected to shock, it’s that much harder for them to do so.”

— Jerry Saltz

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “While the space for artists and curators has increased enormously, maybe, just maybe, that’s left room for too many people calling themselves artists and curators who are simply not up to the term.”

— Jerry Saltz

99. “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

100. “A lot of people still think caring about clothes is a dubious, unserious, frivolous, girlie thing.”

— Jerry Saltz