Jerry Saltz Quotes

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

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.

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

The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she doesn't want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to.

Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.

The secret of food lies in memory - of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

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.

Scandal is only human.

A lot of people still think caring about clothes is a dubious, unserious, frivolous, girlie thing.

Craft is not a category; it's a means. The folks running the museum [Museum of Arts and Design]are sharp, and they know this, but they are in a bind.

Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art.

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

In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.

The New York gallery scene being as incredibly overpopulated and overmoneyed as it is, deep conflicts and contradictions aren't hard to find.

I like that the art world isn't regulated.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

Art is a self-replicating force.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

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

Many things happened in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more 'political' than today. It's time to turn the page.

All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places.

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

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.

I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.

I hate art auctions.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did.

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

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.

In 1998, Artnet was the site that convinced me that if my writing didn't exist online, it didn't exist at all. It showed me criticism's future.

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

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.

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

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

I know it's dangerous to take on bloggers. They can go after you every day, all day long, and anonymous people can chime in, too.

Don't talk. I can't hear myself see.

Certainty sees things in restrictive, protective, aggressive ways, and thus isn't seeing at all.

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

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

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

I'm not for or against video - or any medium or style, for that matter.

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect.

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.

The German ueber-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist.

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

Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession.

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.

Maybe the museum [of Arts and Design ]needs to follow the advice of its acronym and not be afraid to go a little M.A.D.

When art wins, everyone wins.

I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.

To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.

Once artists are expected to shock, it's that much harder for them to do so.

There are many, many art worlds. Art contains multitudes.

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

Energy and art go where they will.

Money is something that can be measured; art is not. It's all subjective.