Quotes by

Jerry Saltz

John Currins exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance, never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion. – 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. – Jerry Saltz

When people in stadiums do the Wave, its the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going. – Jerry Saltz

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

Now people look at The Scream or Van Goghs Irises or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value. – Jerry Saltz

In 1998, Artnet was the site that convinced me that if my writing didnt exist online, it didnt exist at all. It showed me criticisms future. – Jerry Saltz

My nominee for Best Picture of the year – maybe the best picture ever, because its essentially made up of and is an ecstatic love letter to all other movies – is Christian Marclays endlessly enticing must-see masterpiece The Clock. – Jerry Saltz

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, the ability to conceive failure as progress. – Jerry Saltz

Were all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave, and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. Were also allowed to change or modify our opinions. – 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 Im a flesh-eating virus. – Jerry Saltz

Many art-worlders have an if-you-say-so approach to art: Everyone is so scared of missing out on the next hot artist that its never clear whether people are liking work because they like it or because other people do. Everyone is keeping up with the Joneses, and there are more Joneses than ever. – Jerry Saltz

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we dont know what were seeing, we overreact. – Jerry Saltz

Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Arts 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. – Jerry Saltz

Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. Theres 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 Amsterdams or Hamburgs galleries. – 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 dont only rely on this supply-and-demand justification. They go back to values. – Jerry Saltz

Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isnt 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

The reason the art world doesnt 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. Theyre all cliche and already told. – Jerry Saltz

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahns work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isnt simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved isms and twists. – Jerry Saltz

Kinkades paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, Id love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkades work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open. – Jerry Saltz

Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for upsized art and more of it. Ive 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