Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades – even if its now close to aesthetic kudzu. – 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 were not pure enough, good omens appear. – Jerry Saltz

Its great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years. – Jerry Saltz

The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewers journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. Its not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive. – 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

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

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

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

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

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

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