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

Wolfgang Tillmans stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art. – Jerry Saltz

Its art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isnt about progress, and wants to – as Walt Whitman put it – contain multitudes. – Jerry Saltz

Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because hes the biggest, best, or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways hes the weirdest (which is saying a lot when youre talking about the wonderful, wicked, lovable, and annoying creatures known as art dealers). – Jerry Saltz

Theres 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. – Jerry Saltz

When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I wont miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the Eventocracy. All this flashy art-fair art and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event. – 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. – Jerry Saltz

Not to say people shouldnt 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. – Jerry Saltz

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrinos 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. – Jerry Saltz

Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics arent necessarily more high-minded than gallerists. – 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