3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz The art world is molting – some would say melting. Galleries are closing museums are scaling back.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.’
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Art is for anyone. It just isn’t for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that’s irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Poor Georgia O’Keeffe. Death didn’t soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art’s version of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino’s work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Contrary to popular opinion, things don’t go stale particularly fast in the art world.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of ‘disinterest’ strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz The secret of food lies in memory – of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.
