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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

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Being Critical Of Art

Jerry Saltz

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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."

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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.

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Money Is Something That Can Be Measured; Art Is Not. It's All Subjective.

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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.

Certainty Sees Things In Restrictive, Protective, Aggressive Ways, And Thus Isn't Seeing At All.

Biennial Culture Is Already Almost Irrelevant, Because So Many More People Are Providing So Many Better Opportunities For Artists To Exhibit Their Work.

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Calling A Young Artist 'great' These Days Can Give One The Heebie-jeebies: The Word Has Been Denatured In The Past Decade.

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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.

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Anyone Who Relishes Art Should Love The Extraordinary Diversity And Psychic Magic Of Our Art Galleries. There's Likely More Combined Square Footage For The Showing Of Art On One New York Block - West 24th Street Between Tenth And Eleventh Avenues - Than In All Of Amsterdam's Or Hamburg's Galleries.

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.

Only An Artist As Preternaturally Acute And Copacetic, As Oddly Visionary And Just Odd As Richard Artschwager Would Be Able To Lay Out The Whole Course Of Human Evolution And Have It Make Some Kind Of Sense While Also Seeming Like A Dazzling Insight.

All Great Contemporary Artists, Schooled Or Not, Are Essentially Self-taught And Are De-skilling Like Crazy.

It Took The Metropolitan Museum Of Art Nearly 50 Years To Wake Up To Pablo Picasso. It Didn't Own One Of His Paintings Until 1946, When Gertrude Stein Bequeathed That Indomitable Quasi-cubistic Picture Of Herself - A Portrait Of The Writer As A Sumo Buddha - To The Met, Principally Because She Disliked The Museum Of Modern Art.

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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.

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Nearly A Half-century On From Feminism, Simply Being A Woman Artist Is Still A Revolutionary Act. And Getting One's Work Shown Continues To Be Met By Enormous Inbuilt Resistance.

I See 30 To 40 Gallery Shows A Week, And No Matter What Kind Of Mood I'm In, No Matter How Bad The Art Is, I Almost Always Feel Better Afterward. I Can Learn As Much From Bad Art As From Good.

Don't Talk. I Can't Hear Myself See.

Artschwager's Art Always Involves Looking Closely At Surfaces, Questions What An Object Is, Wants To Make You Forget The Name Of The Thing You're Looking At So That It Might Mushroom In Your Mind Into Something That Triggers Unexpected Infinities.

Marlene Dumas Is One Of The Two Or Three Most Successful Female Artists Alive, If You Judge By Prices. I've Never Reviewed Her Work, Because I Find Nothing In It To Get Excited About No Matter How Hard I Look.

New York Being What It Is, Our Museums Are Vertical, Not Horizontal. That Means The Stumbling Blocks To Architectural Clarity Are Unavoidable - But Certainly Surmountable.

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.

Ofili Is Still A Champion. It Would Be A Huge Mistake To Think Otherwise.

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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.

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I Don't Want To Hear At All What The Artist Thinks About His Art. And I'm Not Writing For The Artist. I'm Writing For The Reader, And I Want To Tell The Reader What I Think.

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Scandal Is Only Human.

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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.

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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.

Willem De Kooning Is Generally Credited For Coming Out Of The Painterly Gates Strong In The Forties, Revolutionizing Art And Abstraction And Reaching Incredible Heights By The Early Fifties, And Then Tailing Off.

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).

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There's Something Pleasing About Large, Well-lit Spaces. I Love That Dealers Are Willing To Take Massive Chances In Order To Give This Much Room To Their Artists. Most Of All, I Love That More Galleries Showing More Art Gives More Artists A Shot.

Being Critical Of Art Is A Way Of Showing Art Respect.

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Giant Group Events Are Distorting Organisms: You Can Like And Hate Them In Rapid Succession.

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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.

I Hate When Dealers Talk To Me. I Love Dealers - They're Some Of Our Favorite People In The Art World. But I Hate If They Do A Sales Pitch On Me. I Can't Stand It.

You Can't Prove Rembrandt Is Better Than Norman Rockwell - Although If You Actually Do Prefer Rockwell, I'd Say You Were Shunning Complexity, Were Secretly Conservative, And Hadn't Really Looked At Either Painter's Work. Taste Is A Blood Sport.

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Auctions Are Bizarre Combinations Of Slave Market, Trading Floor, Theatre And Burlesque... A Lot Of People Are Going To Be Making A Lot Of Excuses Or Maintaining That They Were Never Part Of This.

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'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.

Yes, 85 Percent Of The Art You See Isn't Any Good. But Everyone Has A Different Opinion About Which 85 Percent Is Bad. That In Turn Creates Fantastically Unstable Interplay And Argument.

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.

Rumors Sound Of Galleries Asking Artists For Upsized Art And More Of It. I've Heard Of Photographers Asked To Print Larger To Increase The Wall Power And Salability Of Their Work. Everything Winds Up Set To Maximum In Order To Feed The Beast.

Art Is For Anyone. It Just Isn't For Everyone. Still, Over The Past Decade, Its Audience Has Hugely Grown, And That's Irked Those Outside The Art World, Who Get Irritated At Things Like Incomprehensibility Or Money.

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.

Of All The Biennials, Triennials, Quadrennials, Internationals, And Massive Group Shows, Documenta, Established In 1955 And Held Once Every Five Years In Kassel, Germany, Is Seen As The Most Serious. A Statement Show.

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.

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.

First Let Me Report That The Art In The Barnes Collection Has Never Looked Better. My Trips To The Old Barnes Were Always Amazing, But Except On The Sunniest Days, You Could Barely See The Art. The Building Always Felt Pushed Beyond Its Capacity.

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.

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?

I Don't Plan Out My Visits Rigorously, But I Do Have A List Of About 125 New York Galleries, Alternative Spaces, Museums, And So Forth That I Visit Regularly. That's The Closest Thing I Have To A Strategy: I Go To A Lot Of Places, Many That Artists Don't Visit.

Any Critic Will Tell You That There Are A Few Dealers Where You Get A Little Bit Scared To Go Into Their Gallery, And That's Unfair To Them, To Yourself, To The Reader, And To The Artist. But I Just Want To Look. When I'm Done Looking And Writing, I Love Talking To Art Dealers. They Are So Alive And Interesting And Amazing - From Larry Gagosian All The Way On Down.

Artists Working For Other Artists Is All About Knowing, Learning, Unlearning, Initiating Long-term Artistic Dialogues, Making Connections, Creating Covens, And Getting Temporary Shelter From The Storm.

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.

Rumors Sound Of Galleries Asking Artists For Up-sized Art And More Of It... Everything Winds Up Set To Maximum In Order To Feed The Beast. Bigness Is Not All Bad. There's Something Pleasing About Large, Well-lit Spaces. But The Bigness Has Also Led To A Narrowing Of Sensibilities, By Making It Very Hard For Any But The Glitziest Works To Get Traction.

I Also Take Pleasure In The So-called Negative Power In Grotjahn's Work. That Is, I Love His Paintings For What They Are Not. Unlike Much Art Of The Past Decade, Grotjahn Isn't Simply Working From A Prescribed Checklist Of Academically Acceptable, Curator-approved 'isms' And Twists.

While A Large Segment Of The Art World Has Obsessed Over A Tiny Number Of Stars And Their Prices, An Aesthetic Shift Has Been Occurring. It's Not A Movement - Movements Are More Sure Of Themselves. It's A Change Of Mood Or Expectation, A Desire For Art To Be More Than Showy Effects, Big Numbers, And Gamesmanship.

I Rage Against Vincent Van Gogh For Needing To Die At 37, After Painting For Only Ten Years.

When Museums Are Built These Days, Architects, Directors, And Trustees Seem Most Concerned About Social Space: Places To Have Parties, Eat Dinner, Wine-and-dine Donors. Sure, These Are Important These Days - Museums Have To Bring In Money - But They Gobble Up Space And Push The Art Itself Far Away From The Entrance.

John Baldessari, The 79-year-old Conceptualist, Has Spent More Than Four Decades Making Laconic, Ironic Conceptual Art-about-art, Both Good And Bad.

The Art World Is Molting - Some Would Say Melting. Galleries Are Closing; Museums Are Scaling Back.

Not To Say People Shouldn't Get Rich From Art. I Adore The Alchemy Wherein Artists Who Cast A Complex Spell Make Rich People Give Them Their Money. (just Writing It Makes Me Cackle.) But Too Many Artists Have Been Making Money Without Magic.

More And More In The Art World Are Becoming Moralistic, Telling Artists And Critics What They Should And Shouldn't Write, Do, Or Make Art About. Never Mind The Intellectual Hypocrisy Of This: Those Who Violate The Clublike Code Are Made Out To Be Wrong, Immoral, Corrupt.

New Yorkers Only Cross Water For Visual Culture If The Water Is An Ocean. The East River Throws Us For A Huge Loop. If We Started Going To Queens And The Bronx For Visual Culture, Many Of Our Rent, Space, And Crowding Problems Would Be Over Indefinitely.

I Don't Know Much About Auctions. I Sometimes Go To Previews And See Art Sardined Into Ugly Rooms. I've Gawked At The Gaudy Prices, And Gaped At Well-clad Crowds Of Happy White People Conspicuously Spending Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars.

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.

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.

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.

Early-twentieth-century Abstraction Is Art's Version Of Einstein's Theory Of Relativity. It's The Idea That Changed Everything Everywhere: Quickly, Decisively, For Good.

After Too Much Art That Made Too Much Sense, Artists Are Operating Blind Again. They're More Interested In The Possible Than The Probable, The Private That Speaks Publicly Rather Than The Public With No Private Side At All.

Art Is A Self-replicating Force.

Lucian Freud's Career Affirms That The Only Thing An Artist Can Do Is Remain True To Whatever Vision, (lack Of) Talent, Or Ideas That Happened To Pick Them In Order To Be Made Known To The World.

The Very Paradigm Of Revolution, Of Right Versus Wrong, Good Versus Bad, Is A Relic With No Bearing On The Present. Yet Artists, Exhibitions, And Curators Valorize The Sixties. People Who Wrote About These Artists 30 Years Ago Still Write About Them In The Same Ways, Often For The Same Magazines.

In The Seventies, A Group Of American Artists Seized The Means Not Of Production But Of Reproduction. They Tore Apart Visual Culture At A Time Of No Money, No Market, And No One Paying Attention Except Other Artists. Vietnam And Watergate Had Happened; Everything In America Was Being Questioned.

Megacollectors Suppose They Can Enter Art History By Spending Astronomical Amounts.

After Its Hothouse Incubation In The Seventies, Appropriation Breathed Important New Life Into Art. This Life Flowered Spectacularly Over The Decades - Even If It's Now Close To Aesthetic Kudzu.

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."

Poor Georgia O'keeffe. Death Didn't Soften The Opinions Of The Art World Toward Her Paintings.

Georgia O Keeffe

Make An Enemy Of Jealousy And Envy. As Fast And Soon As You Can…. The Art World Is High School With Money.

As I Made My Way Through 'on Line,' The Austere, Stridently Dogmatic, Sometimes Revelatory Exhibition 'about Line' At Moma, I Found Myself Thinking, 'someone Please Wake Me When The Seventies Are Over!' In The Empire Of Curators, The Sun Never Sets On The Seventies. It Is The Undead Decade.

Abstraction Brings The World Into More Complex, Variable Relations; It Can Extract Beauty, Alternative Topographies, Ugliness, And Intense Actualities From Seeming Nothingness.

The Metropolitan Museum Of Art Is Unsurpassed At Presenting More Than 50 Centuries Of Work. I Go There Constantly, Seeing Things Over And Over, Better Than I've Ever Seen Them Before.

Mission Accomplished. The Museum Of Modern Art's Wide-open, Tall-ceilinged, Super-reinforced Second Floor Was For All Intents And Purposes Built To Accommodate Monumental Installations And Gigantic Sculptures, Should The Need Arise. It Has Arisen.

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.

A Lot Of People Still Think Caring About Clothes Is A Dubious, Unserious, Frivolous, Girlie Thing.

I'm Noticing A New Approach To Art Making In Recent Museum And Gallery Shows. It Flickered Into Focus At The New Museum's 'younger Than Jesus' Last Year And Ran Through The Whitney Biennial, And I'm Seeing It Blossom And Bear Fruit At 'greater New York,' Moma P.s. 1's Twice-a-decade Extravaganza Of Emerging Local Talent.

Decades Ago, Gerhard Richter Found A Painterly Philosopher's Stone. Like Jackson Pollock Before Him, He Discovered Something That Had Been In Painting All Along, Always Overlooked Or Discounted.

Mark Grotjahn's Large New Paintings Abound With Torrents Of Ropy Impasto, Laid Down In Thickets, Cascading Waves, And Bundles That Swell, Braid Around, Or Overlap One Another.

Too Many Younger Artists, Critics, And Curators Are Fetishizing The Sixties, Transforming The Period Into A Deformed Cult, A Fantasy Religion, A Hip Brand, And A Crippling Disease.

A Canon Is Antithetical To Everything The New York Art World Has Been About For The Past 40 Years, During Which We Went From Being The Center Of The Art World To Being One Of Many Centers.

Elizabeth Peyton, The Artist Known For Tiny, Dazzling Portraits Of Radiant Youth, Is Now Painting Tiny, Dazzling Portraits Of Radiant Middle Age.

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