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After too much art that made too much sense, artists are operating blind again. They're more interested in the possible than the probable, the private that speaks publicly rather than the public with no private side at all.

Jerry Saltz

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Jerry Saltz
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 19
Art Critic
Art Historian
Historian
Journalist
Oak Park
Illinois
Sense
Interested
Art
Side
Probable
Much
Sides
Publicly
Made
Public
Operating
Possible
Speaks
Rather
Artists
Speak
Private
Artist
Blind

More quotes by Jerry Saltz

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Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
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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Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.
Jerry Saltz
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Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.
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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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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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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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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All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places.
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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Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.
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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Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.
Jerry Saltz
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Living and working for four decades in a Bologna apartment and studio he shared with his unwed sisters, Morandi painted little but bottles, boxes, jars, and vases. Yet like that of Chardin and the underappreciated William Nicholson, Morandi's work seems to slow down time and show you things you've never seen before.
Jerry Saltz
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Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.
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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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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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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Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. 'The Water Lilies' give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light.
Jerry Saltz
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When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.
Jerry Saltz