J

Jerry Saltz

113 quotes

Jerry Saltz (born 1951) is an American art critic and columnist who has served as senior art critic for New York Magazine. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018. Known for his accessible and passionate writing style, Saltz has become one of the most recognizable voices in contemporary art criticism.

“We're all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave, and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We're also allowed to change or modify our opinions.”

— Jerry Saltz

Art

All Quotes by 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

Art

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

— Jerry Saltz

Art

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

— Jerry Saltz

Art

“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

Art

“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

Art

“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

Art

“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

Art

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

— Jerry Saltz

Art

“We're all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave, and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We're also allowed to change or modify our opinions.”

— Jerry Saltz

Art

“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

Learning

“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

Art

“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

Art

“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

Amazing

“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

Art

“'The Panorama' is also the last place anywhere in New York where the World Trade Center still stands, whole, as it stood in the early morning of September 11. I can also see the corner where I saw the first tower fall and howled out loud. Seeing the buildings again here is uplifting, healing.”

— Jerry Saltz

Morning

“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

Art

“'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.”

— Jerry Saltz

Art

“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

Art

“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

Art

“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

Art