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Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery, works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.

Jerry Saltz

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Jerry Saltz
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 19
Art Critic
Art Historian
Historian
Journalist
Oak Park
Illinois
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Pay
Auction
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Many
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More quotes by Jerry Saltz

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Ofili is still a champion. It would be a huge mistake to think otherwise.
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All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy.
Jerry Saltz
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Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing.
Jerry Saltz
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Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.
Jerry Saltz
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The secret of food lies in memory - of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.
Jerry Saltz
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'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.
Jerry Saltz
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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.
Jerry Saltz
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I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call curator's art. Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art? If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.
Jerry Saltz
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In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
Jerry Saltz
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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
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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
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Koons's work has always stood apart for its one-at-a-time perfection, epic theatricality, a corrupted, almost sick drive for purification, and an obsession with traditional artistic values.
Jerry Saltz
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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.
Jerry Saltz
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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 we're not pure enough, good omens appear.
Jerry Saltz
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I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.
Jerry Saltz
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Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.
Jerry Saltz
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'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
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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
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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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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