3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery, works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz I don’t know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I’ve gawked at the gaudy prices, and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz John Currin’s exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance, never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I’ve ever seen them before.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz 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.
3 December 2020 Jerry Saltz Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.
