J

Jerry Saltz

Explore inspiring quotes by Jerry Saltz, a remarkable figure whose words continue to inspire and motivate people around the world.

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Featured Quotes by Jerry Saltz

Some of the most memorable quotes from this author

"Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age."

— Jerry Saltzage

"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 Saltzalone

"There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says."

— Jerry Saltzalone

"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 Saltzamazing

"All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy."

— Jerry Saltzamazing

"Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power."

— Jerry Saltzamazing

All Quotes by Jerry Saltz

Browse all quotes from this author

"Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

aloneView Quote

"There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says."

-Jerry Saltz

aloneView Quote

"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

amazingView Quote

"All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy."

-Jerry Saltz

amazingView Quote

"Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power."

-Jerry Saltz

amazingView Quote

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings."

-Jerry Saltz

"I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art."

-Jerry Saltz

"Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts."

-Jerry Saltz

"The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor."

-Jerry Saltz

"All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places."

-Jerry Saltz

"When art wins, everyone wins."

-Jerry Saltz

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

-Jerry Saltz

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

-Jerry Saltz

"Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not."

-Jerry Saltz

"Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art."

-Jerry Saltz

"I like that the art world isn't regulated."

-Jerry Saltz

"The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing museums are scaling back."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"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

"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

"The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States it is arguably the finest anywhere."

-Jerry Saltz

"Money is something that can be measured art is not. It's all subjective."

-Jerry Saltz

"Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world."

-Jerry Saltz

"Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money."

-Jerry Saltz

"I hate art auctions."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art."

-Jerry Saltz

"All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in an artist's work, or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times, however, these problems mean there's something wrong with the art."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Much good art got made while money ruled I like a lot of it, and hardship and poverty aren't virtues. The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists - especially emerging ones - won't have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They'll be able to experiment as much as they want."

-Jerry Saltz

"While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement - movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage."

-Jerry Saltz

"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

"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

"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

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