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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

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Jerry Saltz
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 19
Art Critic
Art Historian
Historian
Journalist
Oak Park
Illinois
Might
Groups
Squares
Looks
Inside
Museums
Mind
Leave
Realm
People
Public
Realms
Called
Enter
Getting
Group
Art
Quiet
Look
Outside
Noisy

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In some ways Lawler is a conceptual Diane Arbus. She's a stalker who takes advantage of situations. She pulls back curtains, causing normal things to look freakish and the freakish to turn mundane.
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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.
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Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect.
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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.
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Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.
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I love art dealers. In some ways, they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is, create their own aesthetic universes, support artists, employ people, and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.
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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.
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Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for upsized art and more of it. I've heard of photographers asked to print larger to increase the wall power and salability of their work. Everything winds up set to maximum in order to feed the beast.
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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.
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There's a lot of hate mail from readers. There's hate mail, threats, stalkers... I think that I'm bulletproof every week when I've turned something in. I think, I'm a god.
Jerry Saltz
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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.
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My job as art critic is to watch artists dance naked in public, and then I will, in turn, dance naked critically in public.
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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
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After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.
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The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she doesn't want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to.
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The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor.
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A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.
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Anybody who writes knows the horrible, wonderful, beautiful foulness that comes every week. A lot of moaning, screaming agony - Oh my god, the deadline's coming.
Jerry Saltz
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Don't talk. I can't hear myself see.
Jerry Saltz
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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