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My culture-deprived, aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it.

Jerry Saltz

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Jerry Saltz
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 19
Art Critic
Art Historian
Historian
Journalist
Oak Park
Illinois
Never
Chicago
Aspirational
Hated
Suburb
Months
Dragged
Came
Northern
Word
Suburbs
Culture
Institute
Mother
Deprived
Art
Month

More quotes by Jerry Saltz

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Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties.
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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Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.
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'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
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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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I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.
Jerry Saltz
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The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer's journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It's not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive.
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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Ofili is still a champion. It would be a huge mistake to think otherwise.
Jerry Saltz
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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.
Jerry Saltz
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If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.
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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All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy.
Jerry Saltz
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My nominee for Best Picture of the year - maybe the best picture ever, because it's essentially made up of and is an ecstatic love letter to all other movies - is Christian Marclay's endlessly enticing must-see masterpiece 'The Clock.'
Jerry Saltz
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Artschwager's art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you're looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.
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.
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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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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The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.
Jerry Saltz