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

Categorized in : Art Crazy Rocks

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

italian artist years

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

psychics comfort art

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

style artist years

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

critics artist art

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

Jerry Saltz

way world art

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

The reason I love blogs so much right now is that I am seeing more critical voices appear, and that's kind of thrilling. I think a lot of critics in their forties or even their thirties have had their voice scared or trained out of them by the academy. I have nothing against the academy. I think it's brilliant and fantastic, but I also think that it's become almost monolithic. The same way a lot of art looks the same, a lot of writing can sound the same and quotes the same theorists.

Jerry Saltz

writing art thinking

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

Jerry Saltz

art-is opportunity art

'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

new-york summer art

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

Jerry Saltz

video ideas art

Any negative review you write, they'll say, "Oh, you're being so mean." I think the problem with a lot of criticism is that too many critics either write just description or they write in a Mandarin jargon that only a handful of people can understand, or they write happy criticis - everything is good that they write about. I think that's really not good. I think it's damaged a lot of our critical voices.

Jerry Saltz

writing mean thinking

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

Jerry Saltz

hardest wells photography

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

Jerry Saltz

news america art

Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.

Jerry Saltz

running lying art

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

problem art thinking

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

mind joy people

Make an enemy of jealousy and envy. As fast and soon as you can…. The art world is high school with money.

Jerry Saltz

envy art school

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

cities new-york art

I just want to say one thing about the '70s. Enough with this purer, "It was a better time," business. Every time is about as polluted and needy and beautiful as most other times. I was around in the '70s, and people were just as ambitious and envious and filled with need and desire as they are today.

Jerry Saltz

desire beautiful people

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

camouflage narrative art