Jerry Saltz Quotes - Page 5

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• After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land.

  Jerry Saltz

  Years, Land, Gnarly

  New York Volume 43, Issues 14-21, New York Magazine Company, p. 1, 2010.

  16 Copy quote

• Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.

  Jerry Saltz

  Past, Artist, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in an artist's work, or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times, however, these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Mean, Years

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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

  Art, War, School

  57 Copy quote

• I wish I could write about shows outside New York. I often feel like the last person to know anything, because I almost never get to leave town, and when I do, I tend to go for three days max. Seeing between 30 and 40 shows a week in 100 or so galleries and museums takes up nearly all my time.

  Jerry Saltz

  New York, Writing, Museums

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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

  Dog, Art, War

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• Koons's work has always stood apart for its one-at-a-time perfection, epic theatricality, a corrupted, almost sick drive for purification, and an obsession with traditional artistic values.

  Jerry Saltz

  Epic, Sick, Perfection

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• Ofili is still a champion. It would be a huge mistake to think otherwise.

  Jerry Saltz

  Mistake, Thinking, Champion

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• Turns out Picasso's passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.

  Jerry Saltz

  Passion, Thrill, Mystery

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• John Currin's exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance, never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.

  Jerry Saltz

  Knowing, Ironic, Balance

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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

  Art, Museums, Important

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• Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing.

  Jerry Saltz

  Inspirational, Dance, Art

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• Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Memories, Flower

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• Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.

  Jerry Saltz

  Eye, Psychics, Creating

  7 Copy quote

• Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he's the biggest, best, or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he's the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you're talking about the wonderful, wicked, lovable, and annoying creatures known as art dealers).

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Talking, Wicked

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• Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Mean, Past

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• Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

  Jerry Saltz

  Caves, Suave, Cave Paintings

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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

  Thinking, Artist, Style

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• I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Matter, Taste

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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

  Use, Dishwashers, Restaurants

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• I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.

  Jerry Saltz

  Cheating, Mistake, Eye

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• Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to; art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

  Jerry Saltz

  Country, Art, Mentor

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• If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Years, Two

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• In some ways Lawler is a conceptual Diane Arbus. She's a stalker who takes advantage of situations. She pulls back curtains, causing normal things to look freakish and the freakish to turn mundane.

  Jerry Saltz

  Looks, Way, Normal

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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

  Art, Two, Water

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