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

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

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. Hes the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed. – Jerry Saltz

Artschwagers art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing youre looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities. – Jerry Saltz

Poor Georgia OKeeffe. Death didnt soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings. – Jerry Saltz

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The citys magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. – Jerry Saltz

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is arts version of Einsteins Theory of Relativity. Its the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good. – Jerry Saltz

Ive always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art. – Jerry Saltz

Abstract Expressionism – the first American movement to have a worldwide influence – was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and youll find a would-be Willem de Kooning). – 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 Ive ever seen them before. – Jerry Saltz

I like that the art world isnt regulated. – Jerry Saltz

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and youll find it. Its there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film. – Jerry Saltz