Quote

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 I'm a flesh-eating virus.

Jerry Saltz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jerry Saltz
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 19
Art Critic
Art Historian
Historian
Journalist
Oak Park
Illinois
Like
Painting
Days
Artist
Priced
Tell
Virus
Art
Viruses
Around
Flesh
Look
Artists
Looks
Eating

More quotes by Jerry Saltz

Image
Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's 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 Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries.
Jerry Saltz
Image
Turns out Picasso's passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.
Jerry Saltz
Image
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
Image
When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won't 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
Image
It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.'
Jerry Saltz
Image
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
Image
Make an enemy of jealousy and envy. As fast and soon as you can…. The art world is high school with money.
Jerry Saltz
Image
The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States it is arguably the finest anywhere.
Jerry Saltz
Image
I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.
Jerry Saltz
Image
I'm not for or against video - or any medium or style, for that matter.
Jerry Saltz
Image
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
Image
I just want to say one thing about the '70s. Enough with this purer, It was a better time, business. Every time is about as polluted and needy and beautiful as most other times. I was around in the '70s, and people were just as ambitious and envious and filled with need and desire as they are today.
Jerry Saltz
Image
I see around 100 shows a month, going from Niketown-size palaces where you feel like yelling, to storefronts in Bushwick. Each has to pay the bills keep artists happy and cope with collectors (oy!), curators (ay-yi-yi), critics (woo-hoo!), and occasionally plumbers. That their fiscal life often hangs in the balance only adds to the energy.
Jerry Saltz
Image
Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype it creates new beauty or it doesn't.
Jerry Saltz
Image
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
Image
Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession.
Jerry Saltz
Image
All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places.
Jerry Saltz
Image
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
Image
After too much art that made too much sense, artists are operating blind again. They're more interested in the possible than the probable, the private that speaks publicly rather than the public with no private side at all.
Jerry Saltz
Image
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