Jerry Saltz Quotes

Quotes about:

Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that the Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years?

Jerry Saltz

Artist, Italian, Years

45 Copy quote
To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously.

Jerry Saltz

Art, Psychics, Comfort

31 Copy quote
All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy. I don't look for skill in art... skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency... I'm interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or reimagine it: an engineer, say, who builds rockets from rocks.

Jerry Saltz

Art, Crazy, Rocks

"The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos: A Renaissance of Romanticism in Modernity" by Pietros Maneos, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 29, 2012.

13 Copy quote
Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.

Jerry Saltz

Art, World, Way

17 Copy quote
The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes, placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both, and create a third thing.

Jerry Saltz

Art, Two, Three

7 Copy quote
Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into a new kind of artist-photographer of modern life.

Jerry Saltz

Artist, Years, Style

20 Copy quote
A great artist has a unique vision...obsession. They are someone willing to fail flamboyantly.

Jerry Saltz

Artist, Unique, Vision

4 Copy quote
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

Art, Squares, Museums

13 Copy quote
Art schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.

Jerry Saltz

Teacher, Art, School

15 Copy quote
When people in stadiums do the Wave, it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.

Jerry Saltz

People, Joy, Mind

17 Copy quote
Art is a self-replicating force.

Jerry Saltz

Art, Self, Force

4 Copy quote
I think that cynicism is the enemy. Cynicism thinks it knows how things work. "Oh yeah, you know how that works." I think uncertainty is the thing you have to keep embracing. You have to keep saying, I actually don't know, and going out is going to tell me something every time.

Jerry Saltz

Thinking, Enemy, Cynicism

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

4 Copy quote
Don't talk. I can't hear myself see.

Jerry Saltz

I Can

"Roberta Smith & Jerry Saltz". Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 9, 2013.

5 Copy quote
Energy and art go where they will.

Jerry Saltz

Art, Energy

7 Copy quote
Photography is the easiest thing to make, and one of the hardest things to make well.

Jerry Saltz

Photography, Hardest, Wells

Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. November 13, 2013.

7 Copy quote
The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

Jerry Saltz

Art, New York, Cities

15 Copy quote
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

Art, Camouflage, Narrative

"Cubes! The Horror!". nymag.com. April 1, 2012.

13 Copy quote
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

Writing, Thinking, Trying

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

4 Copy quote
'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

Summer, Art, New York

10 Copy quote
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

Mean, Artist, Style

7 Copy quote
Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

Jerry Saltz

Art, Opportunity, Art Is

10 Copy quote
Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

Jerry Saltz

World, Tools, Visionaries

"Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

9 Copy quote
Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money.

Jerry Saltz

Art, America, News

6 Copy quote
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

Light, Water Lily, Giving

13 Copy quote
Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

Jerry Saltz

Art, Ugly, Boring

6 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Peter Schjeldahl

Latest quotes from interviews

"Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect. No sports writer would say, "Well the Yankees had a great season this year." No food critic would get a bad meal and say, "Oh, it was so lovely." It always strikes me as odd when people say, "Why do you write negatively about any art?" I think that everybody has mixed feelings about everything - even Goya. I mean, I look at Rembrandt sometimes and I hear a voice in my head go, "It's pretty brown.""

- Jerry Saltz,

www.interviewmagazine.com, added Aug 22, 2017

More (19)

Jerry Saltz

Follow

Born: March 19, 1951
Occupation: Art critic
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics