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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
Persons
Works
Person
Pay
Auction
Need
Wants
Auctions
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Rigged
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More quotes by Jerry Saltz

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Only an artist as preternaturally acute and copacetic, as oddly visionary and just odd as Richard Artschwager would be able to lay out the whole course of human evolution and have it make some kind of sense while also seeming like a dazzling insight.
Jerry Saltz
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I hate when dealers talk to me. I love dealers - they're some of our favorite people in the art world. But I hate if they do a sales pitch on me. I can't stand it.
Jerry Saltz
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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
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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
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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.
Jerry Saltz
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Ofili is still a champion. It would be a huge mistake to think otherwise.
Jerry Saltz
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Once artists are expected to shock, it's that much harder for them to do so.
Jerry Saltz
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Many things happened in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more 'political' than today. It's time to turn the page.
Jerry Saltz
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I think that writing is a process that tells you what you think. You sometimes actually don't know what your opinion is until you hear yourself trying to piece it out and have it make sense to you. The process itself is so bizarre and mysterious that you never know what it's going to tell you.
Jerry Saltz
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Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants, and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.
Jerry Saltz
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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.
Jerry Saltz
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It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.
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
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Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.
Jerry Saltz
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Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.
Jerry Saltz
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The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
Jerry Saltz
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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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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.
Jerry Saltz
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As I went through 'This Progress,' one of two performance pieces by Tino Sehgal that transform Frank Lloyd Wright's emptied-out spiral into a dreamy Socratic-purgatorial journey, the museum literally fell away. I was suspended in some weird nonspace.
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