3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States it is arguably the finest anywhere.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
