Jerry Saltz
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and a columnist for New York magazine. Formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
, Saltz has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
in Criticism three times. He was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Saltz has also served as a Visiting Critic at The School of Visual Arts, Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio Residency Program. He lives in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
with his wife Roberta Smith
Roberta Smith
Roberta Smith is an art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art.Born in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Smith studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her career in the arts started in 1968 while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in...
, senior art critic for the New York Times.
Work
Artnet
artnet is an online service provider for the international art market with headquarters in New York, Berlin and Paris. Additionally, artnet has regional offices in China, the UK and Russia.- Business model :...
magazine, Saltz codified his outlook: "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."
In Seeing Out Loud, his collection of Village Voice columns published in 2003, he said he considers himself the kind of critic that Peter Plagens calls a "goalie," someone who says "It's going to have to be pretty good to get by me."
Saltz has cited Manny Farber's "termite art" and Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation...
's "Babylon" as well as other wide ranging systemic metaphors for the art world
Art world
The art world is composed of all the people involved in the production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and sale of art. Howard S. Becker describes it as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things,...
. Although he's defended the art market, he's also called out faddy market behavior and the fetish for youth, saying "the art world eats its young."
On a College Art Association
College Art Association
The College Art Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for practitioners and scholars of art, art history, and art criticism...
panel in February 2007, Saltz commented, "We live in a Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
art world. Twenty years ago, there were only four to five encyclopedias--and I tried to get into them. Now, all writing is in the Wikipedia. Some entries are bogus, some are the best. We live in an open art world
Art world
The art world is composed of all the people involved in the production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and sale of art. Howard S. Becker describes it as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things,...
."
His humor, irreverence, self-deprecation
Self-deprecation
Self-deprecation, or Self-depreciation, is the act of belittling or undervaluing oneself. It can be used in humor and tension release.-In comedy:...
and volubility have earned him the designation as the Rodney Dangerfield
Rodney Dangerfield
Rodney Dangerfield , was an American comedian, and actor, known for the catchphrases "I don't get no respect!," "No respect, no respect at all... that's the story of my life" or "I get no respect, I tell ya" and his monologues on that theme...
of the art world. He has expressed doubt about the influence of art critics as purveyors of taste, saying they have little influence in the success of an artist’s career. Nonetheless, ArtReview
ArtReview
-Publication:ArtReview covers established and emerging artists in a mixture of international exhibition reviews, artist profiles, city art tours and artist commissions, including artist projects published as supplements to the regular edition of the magazine...
called him the 73rd most powerful person in the art world in their 2009 Power 100 list.
In 2007, he received the Frank Jewett Mather
Frank Jewett Mather
Frank Jewett Mather was an American art critic and professor.He was born at Deep River, Conn., and graduated from Williams College in 1889 and from Johns Hopkins in 1892: he studied also at Berlin and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris...
Award for art criticism from the College Art Association
College Art Association
The College Art Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for practitioners and scholars of art, art history, and art criticism...
.
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
more actively than any other art critic. He uses the site to post daily questions and diatribes to his audience of friends, which hovered at 4,970 friends in February 2010. He has stated that he wants to demystify the art critic to artists and a general art audience. His posts are less polished and restrained than his writing for New York Magazine and he has even shared personal matters including family tragedies, career bumps and his diet. He told the New York Observer
New York Observer
The New York Observer is a weekly newspaper first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, by Arthur L. Carter, a very successful former investment banker with publishing interests. The Observer focuses on the city's culture, real estate, the media, politics and the entertainment and...
, "It's exciting to be in this room with 5,000 people. It's like the Cedar Bar for me, or Max's Kansas City
Max's Kansas City
Max's Kansas City was a nightclub and restaurant at 213 Park Avenue South, in New York City, which was a gathering spot for musicians, poets, artists and politicians in the 1960s and 1970s.-Origin of name:...
."
He's used his page to defend the use of irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
in art, arguing against adherents of "the New Seriousness" who he calls the "Purity Police."
In 2010 artist Jennifer Dalton
Jennifer Dalton
Jennifer Dalton is a contemporary artist born in 1967.Dalton is represented by Winkleman Gallery in New York City, where she has exhibited since 2002...
exhibited an artwork called "What Are We Not Shutting Up About?" at the FLAG Foundation in New York that statistically analyzed 5 months of Facebook conversations between Saltz and his online friends. In an interview with Artinfo
ARTINFO
Artinfo is the web site of Louise Blouin Media, a cultural media group.Artinfo focuses on coverage of the art world and culture with daily updates of breaking news, artist profiles, stories about collectors and collecting, gallery round-ups from around the world, market trends and analysis, and...
, Dalton said of the work, “I became interested in Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page as an amazing site of written dialogue and as a place where culture is being created on the spot. I think my piece, and Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page itself, tells us that a lot of people in the art world crave dialogue and community, and when a space is welcoming enough people really flock to it.”
In 2010, Saltz asked his Facebook friends about art studio (or office) door signs—and then later sought someone to compile the replies. The result was a book featuring Saltz and dozens of his page's followers' quotes: JERRY SALTZ ART CRITIC's Fans, Friends, & The Tribes Suggested ART STUDIO DOOR SIGNS of Real Life or Fantasy (ISBN 978-0-9798261-0-8).
Work of Art
Saltz served as a judge in the Bravo series Work of Art: The Next Great ArtistWork of Art: The Next Great Artist
Work of Art: The Next Great Artist is an American reality competition show that airs on the cable television network Bravo, in which up-and-coming artists compete for a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and a cash prize of $100,000. The show is produced by Pretty Matches Productions and...
which premiered on June 9, 2010.
Book Announcement
In early August 2010 Saltz announced on his Facebook page that he and his wife Roberta Smith intend to publish a book of their favorite paintings in New York. The couple will select their 100 favorite paintings in New York museums and write 100-word entries for each. Saltz encouraged submissions from guest artists, critics, curators, and dealersArt dealer
An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art. Art dealers' professional associations serve to set high standards for accreditation or membership and to support art exhibitions and shows.-Role:...
in the post on his Facebook page. He informed his online friends that "there's no money in this for you whatsoever," but promises a byline
Byline
The byline on a newspaper or magazine article gives the name, and often the position, of the writer of the article. Bylines are traditionally placed between the headline and the text of the article, although some magazines place bylines at the bottom of the page, to leave more room for graphical...
for authors of selected entries. The project grew out of a feature he wrote for New York Magazine reporting on some of the paintings in New York museums that he spent his summer visiting. Referring to the South African born art critic Wendy Beckett
Wendy Beckett
Sister Wendy Beckett is a South African-born British art expert, consecrated virgin and contemplative hermit who became a celebrity during the 1990s, presenting a series of acclaimed art history documentaries for the BBC.-Biography:...
, he described himself as "Sister Wendy in swimming trunks."
Books
- Saltz, Jerry. Seeing Out Loud: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1998-2003. Gt Barrington: The Figures, 2003; reprinted 2007; 410 pp. (paperback), ISBN 978-1930589179.
- Saltz, Jerry. Seeing Out Louder. Hudson Hills Press LLC, 2009; 420 pp. (hardcover), ISBN 978-1555953188.
External links
- Seeing Out Loud is available direct from the publisher.
- Jerry Saltz Article Archives on Artnet.com
- Jerry Saltz Archive at New York Magazine
- http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/09/art/jerry-saltz-in-conversation-with-irving-sandlerJerry Saltz with Irving Sandler: an interview by Irving SandlerIrving SandlerIrving Sandler is an American art critic and educator. He has provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, particularly around the abstract expressionist circles of the 1950s, where he managed the Downtown Tanager Gallery and co-ordinated the New York artists' 'Club' from 1955 to its...
] published in The Brooklyn RailThe Brooklyn RailThe Brooklyn Rail is a political, artistic and literary magazine based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Coverage includes political andliterary essays, art criticism, interviews, original fiction and poetry, and reviews....