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Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

Jerry Saltz

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Jerry Saltz
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 19
Art Critic
Art Historian
Historian
Journalist
Oak Park
Illinois
Ideas
Quickly
Everything
Everywhere
Decisively
Good
Early
Relativity
Theory
Einstein
Changed
Twentieth
Century
Abstraction
Idea
Version
Art
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More quotes by Jerry Saltz

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More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.
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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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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Biennial culture is already almost irrelevant, because so many more people are providing so many better opportunities for artists to exhibit their work.
Jerry Saltz
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Although I adore the Italian High Renaissance, I'd rather look at Mannerism. The former is ordered, integrated, otherworldly, and grandiose it leaves you feeling hungry for something flawed and of-the-flesh.
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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Nearly a half-century on from feminism, simply being a woman artist is still a revolutionary act. And getting one's work shown continues to be met by enormous inbuilt resistance.
Jerry Saltz
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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
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I have never really cooked, don't know how to use my dishwasher, and subsist mainly on prepared deli takeout. I don't even eat in restaurants much.
Jerry Saltz
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Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.
Jerry Saltz
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The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor.
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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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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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
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The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years.
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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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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All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy.
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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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