The New York gallery scene being as incredibly overpopulated and overmoneyed as it is, deep conflicts and contradictions aren’t hard to find. – Jerry Saltz
To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously. – Jerry Saltz
A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers. – Jerry Saltz
New York being what it is, our museums are vertical, not horizontal. That means the stumbling blocks to architectural clarity are unavoidable – but certainly surmountable. – Jerry Saltz
If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn’t too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything. – Jerry Saltz
Mark Grotjahn’s large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another. – Jerry Saltz
Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren’t necessarily more high-minded than gallerists. – Jerry Saltz
Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age. – Jerry Saltz
In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers. – Jerry Saltz
I see artists bored by light-without-heat, irked at gigantic galleries’ pushing out art-as-product, leaving behind the over determined for the undetermined, guided by interior voices and bringing us out of a long tunnel to new blueness. – Jerry Saltz
The reason the art world doesn’t 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. They’re all cliche and already told. – Jerry Saltz
Art is for anyone. It just isn’t for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that’s irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money. – Jerry Saltz
Although I adore the Italian High Renaissance, I’d rather look at Mannerism. The former is ordered, integrated, otherworldly, and grandiose; it leaves you feeling hungry for something flawed and of-the-flesh. – Jerry Saltz
You can’t prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell – although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I’d say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn’t really looked at either painter’s work. Taste is a blood sport. – Jerry Saltz
The last time money left the art world, intrepid types maxed out their credit cards and opened galleries, and a few of them have become the best in the world. – 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. – Jerry Saltz
Galleries began growing in both number and size in the late seventies, when artists who worked in lofts wanted to exhibit their work in spaces similar to the ones the art was made in. – Jerry Saltz
Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease. – 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. – Jerry Saltz
It’s 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
Artschwager’s art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you’re looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities. – Jerry Saltz
While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It’s not a movement – movements are more sure of themselves. It’s a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship. – Jerry Saltz
My culture-deprived, aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb – where the word art never came up – to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it. – Jerry Saltz
Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off. – Jerry Saltz
Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art’s version of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good. – Jerry Saltz
I know it’s dangerous to take on bloggers. They can go after you every day, all day long, and anonymous people can chime in, too. – Jerry Saltz
A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, ‘The Clock’ is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself – something almost inhuman. – Jerry Saltz
In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned. – 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