Top 160 Jerry Saltz Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Jerry Saltz

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Galleries needn’t be exactly like White Columns purely because times are bad again. But the idea of this special space could – should – help shape what comes next.”

— Jerry Saltz

108. “When people in stadiums do the Wave, it’s the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.”

— Jerry Saltz

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “Energy and art go where they will.”

— Jerry Saltz

115. “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

116. “Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease.”

— Jerry Saltz

117. “In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.”

— Jerry Saltz

118. “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

119. “Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did.”

— Jerry Saltz

120. “Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for upsized art and more of it. I’ve heard of photographers asked to print larger to increase the wall power and salability of their work. Everything winds up set to maximum in order to feed the beast.”

— Jerry Saltz

121. “Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money.”

— Jerry Saltz

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on Art.”

— Jerry Saltz

127. “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

128. “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

129. “All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places.”

— Jerry Saltz

130. “The reason the art world doesn’t respond to Kinkade is because none – not one – of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They’re all cliche and already told.”

— Jerry Saltz

131. “Poor Georgia O’Keeffe. Death didn’t soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.”

— Jerry Saltz

132. “It’s great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.”

— Jerry Saltz

133. “The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.”

— Jerry Saltz

134. “Ofili is still a champion. It would be a huge mistake to think otherwise.”

— Jerry Saltz

135. “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

136. “Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.”

— Jerry Saltz

137. “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

138. “Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.”

— Jerry Saltz

139. “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

140. “If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.”

— Jerry Saltz

141. “Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.”

— Jerry Saltz

142. “Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter ‘found’ and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.”

— Jerry Saltz

143. “I don’t plan out my visits rigorously, but I do have a list of about 125 New York galleries, alternative spaces, museums, and so forth that I visit regularly. That’s the closest thing I have to a strategy: I go to a lot of places, many that artists don’t visit.”

— Jerry Saltz

144. “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

145. “I’m not for or against video – or any medium or style, for that matter.”

— Jerry Saltz

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “Scandal is only human.”

— Jerry Saltz

150. “The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.”

— Jerry Saltz