Artists working for other artists is all about knowing, learning, unlearning, initiating long-term artistic dialogues, making connections, creating covens, and getting temporary shelter from the storm. – Jerry Saltz
Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools – only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art. – Jerry Saltz
Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they’re doing it? – Jerry Saltz
When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting. – Jerry Saltz
Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he’s the biggest, best, or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he’s the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you’re talking about the wonderful, wicked, lovable, and annoying creatures known as art dealers). – Jerry Saltz
I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years. – Jerry Saltz
Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled. – Jerry Saltz
When the purse strings tighten up at museums, the institutions usually cut back and cancel shows. That’s exactly the wrong reaction. In fact, now is a good time for them to loosen up – a chance to breathe and experiment a little – and go for the juicy solution lurking in their own basements. – Jerry Saltz
Of all the biennials, triennials, quadrennials, internationals, and massive group shows, Documenta, established in 1955 and held once every five years in Kassel, Germany, is seen as the most serious. A statement show. – Jerry Saltz
I wish I could write about shows outside New York. I often feel like the last person to know anything, because I almost never get to leave town, and when I do, I tend to go for three days max. Seeing between 30 and 40 shows a week in 100 or so galleries and museums takes up nearly all my time. – Jerry Saltz
Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art. – Jerry Saltz
Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. – Jerry Saltz
Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness. – Jerry Saltz
Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I’ve never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look. – Jerry Saltz
As I made my way through ‘On Line,’ the austere, stridently dogmatic, sometimes revelatory exhibition ‘about line’ at MoMA, I found myself thinking, ‘Someone please wake me when the seventies are over!’ In the empire of curators, the sun never sets on the seventies. It is the undead decade. – Jerry Saltz
Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film. – Jerry Saltz
Giorgio Morandi’s paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style. – Jerry Saltz
Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world. – Jerry Saltz
The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city’s magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. – Jerry Saltz
Now people look at ‘The Scream’ or Van Gogh’s ‘Irises’ or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value. – Jerry Saltz
In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don’t know what we’re seeing, we overreact. – Jerry Saltz
Calling a young artist ‘great’ these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade. – 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
Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists. – Jerry Saltz
It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn’t own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself – a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha – to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art. – Jerry Saltz
Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did. – Jerry Saltz
Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open. – Jerry Saltz
Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books. – Jerry Saltz