Jerry Saltz

It began two days before Easter 1975, before everybody here was born. It was supposed to end on Easter the year 2000. Okay, that's...

Yeah, and I made it as far as the third canto. The work was well received. But as you know, with all the great stuff happening to you, how old are you? I am 39 years old. Already. You think I'm over the hill, I'm washed up.

Yeah, mine hurts, and I have aches and pains. Nothing will protect you. So all I can offer is to say to yourself, I'm not going to look at others, the accomplishment of others. I'm going to just look at myself. You are cause in the matter. You created your situation, not all of their success. So make an enemy of envy.

And it's like an old address or your... It's a thing that's very dear to me.

Anybody listening to this podcast will understand this. You would never look at every goddamn New York Jets game and say, they're so great. Oh my God, their offensive line is off the charts fantastic. No, love means also being critical. Movie critics aren't supposed to like everything. Wine writers don't love every wine. But for some reason... Art critics are expected to love everything.

Okay. It's very dear to me. It's a childhood resonance. Got it. Got it. I know what it is. It's okay.

I would say that we're living in a period of culture where criticism has seemed to leave the building, meaning that everyone's afraid. I know what we're afraid of. We're afraid of being called racist, sexist, homophobes, xenophobes. So what's happened... I think through a lack of nerve, but also a dramatic shift in what criticism is in the present. Now criticism holds things up.

We put this woman artist above us and we hold her up or that queer artist above us. I'm all for that. The art world had closed doors for 50,000 years. Where are all the Asian artists in Western art history? There aren't any because we didn't believe it was possible. I imagine sports is going through something similar but on a corporate level as it becomes more and more and more monetized.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, or whatever the number is, it's an obscene amount of money. It's offensive. you could uh fund every rape kit left languishing on the shelves in america for 10 years for that one painting but on the other hand somebody wanted the painting you only need two people to bid on something that's right and i hate auctions but i accept them as part of our current reality on the other hand

It leaves an opening for everyone else who isn't obsessed with money. We all want it. I get that. We're supposed to be jealous of everyone making $59 million. But it leaves an opening for art to get on with its business. And it's doing just great.

having huge hits of what Werner Herzog called ecstatic truths, which means opening spaces for consciousness to step outside yourself, to slow time down. There's still space for that, but not out there in the market.

I said it was because, listen, I loved the Amy Sherald portrait of Michelle Obama, mind you. So these two paintings were presented at the same time. Kehinde Wiley's painting is because it's photo realism. Good for photo realism. It projects an image. You get a picture, you project it, you paint it perfect, you send it to China, they can do it.

Kehinde has his studio fill in a cuckoo background and sets Barack on an African chair. I guess that's his contribution. And as a painting, It is completely unoriginal. As an image of Obama, it's unlike every other presidential portrait ever made. So it depends how you, I judge it as a thing, not as what the artist says it is. My wife says no artist owns the meaning of their own work.

In other words, each of us, as Oscar Wilde said, when we read a book, we're not reading the author. You're reading yourself. When you read Dante, you are reading yourself into Dante, into Shakespeare, into Mozart, into Jay-Z, into Beyonce, whoever. The other portrait was much better of Amy Sherald.

It's a pleasure. I love, I've heard of you. I was thrilled to come here, but I've never listened because I don't.

Bingo. And you know what? There are a lot of artists like that. I can tell you their names if you want to go. They will never make you go deep. What they'll make you do is they'll tell you what you already know and they'll tell you the same thing over and over again. And that's very reassuring. I don't look to art to be reassured. That's also saying, oh, a black woman could be Napoleon.

That's a cool thought, but it would be cooler if you could make it a cooler painting. And he can't do it. And other artists do. Do you know who Dwayne Wade is? I do not know. Who is Dwayne Wade? This is perfect.

So that's Dwayne Wade, great, great athlete.

That's true. It doesn't look anything like him. What I'll say is that is an absolute s***. work of art because it looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy and it's just got it there's nothing to it other than the pose so you want to and he looks like the rock He looks white, which is fine with me, but, you know, it has no character. It has no ambience.

Well, it's not that important to me. I can see that it could be important to people who worship that person. But I would remind all of those worshipers and fans that all the different pictures of Jesus that they've seen are equally realistic and equal fictions. that they're idealized or de-idealized or maybe you like Francis Bacon's exploding Jesus. Maybe that speaks to you.

Yeah, we're the last of our kind. All these magazines, The New Yorker, New York. No one knows what we are. I don't know what we do. But what we do, we do better than everybody else until there's no more need for it. And then we'll just go away.

What this says is I wanted to be a realist sculptor and I found a photograph and I made it without paying much attention to it at all. other than the signature pose. So in the next generation, we'll look at that sculpture and see metal. They won't see a person. They won't see a likeness. They'll see a material, and even the material isn't that interesting. Right, the bronze.

That's all they're going to see. I promise you. It looks like a lot of academic sculpture. You know, the mouth is open. I can see the teeth. Somebody got in there and filed them down. Good on them. Good technique, I guess. That's good. I would pay $400 for that and put it in a backyard at best. There's nothing wrong with that. That's fun.

I'd love to hear it.

It looks like art by committee. That's what it is. It looks like art by more than one person with no touch, no hand, only an idea. They're not even artists, those two guys. They're entrepreneurs. They're scammers. They don't know it. Listen.

To me, I allege that they might be scammers in this sense, that Oscar Wilde said all the worst poetry is sincere. So what? That they sincerely wanted to make this realistic. Good on them. I didn't take that away from them. I don't think it looks like anybody.

No, that's fine. Dwayne Reed liked it, and he's cool with it. And could they have made something magnificent? Yes, they could. But they could have also made something much worse. It could have been a piece of string, you know, tied to a chain, some bulls**t. That happens as well. So this is a happy medium between thinking and non-thinking that looks like a photograph in three dimensions.

What do you think of this sculpture?

I've stood there. I've posed with him. What I want to say is that some of the greatest sculpture ever made was made in Greece and Rome of athletes.

Okay.

This... As much as I love the first Rocky movie.

It's been a good run. That's all I'll say. It's been a great run. Yeah, it's like the New York Jets, you know. They have to completely rethink everything. We hate them and screw them. Yeah, yeah. Are you a sports fan? I am a big football fan and a baseball fan. I'm a Yankee fan and the Jets and Giants. And that's it. And I'm a huge F1 nerd since the TV show and the pre-pandemic and all of that.

Yeah, watch it. You know, it has a happy ending, whatever. But the point is, as a work of art... It only goes to the Wade Johnson place. You could put the name Wade Johnson on this. It would be the same. The pose has- Oh, the Dwayne Wade, you mean. The Dwayne Wade.

So I love it. So this is another... Is that you? No. Oh, that's Sylvester Stallone. Ha ha ha ha! He's as tall as I am. I love him. He's a big Trump guy, but he's done good work. And you know what? That's true. All that's true. It's fine. You know, Dwayne Reed and that guy, they contributed a lot to the culture.

They should get statues of themselves.

You should. I just hope that yours will be better.

Can I see the close-up of the humunculus beneath him? Wow. Wow.

The figure underneath... Michael is great, and he's got an extra face. His face has fallen off. It's like an arm with, like, 70 figures. I mean, here's what's great. The pose of this and the juxtaposition of the super realist, this is better for one reason. The idea of the Baroque means... The Baroque back in the 1600s was the invention of movies, of the cinematic, dramatic, melodramatic motion.

Action, action. This is an action shot. This is a frozen moment in time. The basketball is just on Michael's fingertips. His left hand is giving himself balance. His feet are spread out for maximum height and balance. The person underneath him becomes meaningless. Right, as if they are every person he's ever jumped over. It's you. That's mortal reality, immortal reality.

Again, the realism is what it is. That's not bad. He's like his hair under his arm. His lip is being clenched. He's like staring at the target. There's stuff going on there. Who made that one?

His holder work is better. Yeah.

And that's what makes you a great commentator and podcaster. You understand that. The quality has been determined in this case by the market picking something the market already picked.

Okay? And you're getting that self-reiterative quality. smoothing out and deadening that that will do.

I would call it a travesty of mimosas, meaning it doesn't look anything mimetic art because it doesn't look even remotely. They've taken a thin woman, a blonde, and made her into Gertrude Stein. And for that, that's kind of interesting. Or, you know, like a Russian policewoman.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. No. If I were Brandy, I might be a little miffed, but... You know, I don't think athletes even think that way.

God. Yes, that's the grimace. I don't know where the grimace came from.

It's a picture of Gary Busey.

So this is... That could be a great piece of folk art. That is a great piece of f***ed up, super crazy, manneristic, meaning the neck is about a foot and a half long, the hair is standing up and out, the face is completely crooked, the eyes are asymmetrical. The eyes are doing a lot here. He's looking at with sheer madness... I'd love to meet that artist.

That's well said. I think if we saw the picture of the artist, we don't know. But that is one great sculpture. Whoa. So you love this one. Not of Ronaldo. It is not Ronaldo. That's fine.

I would tell that artist to push all these ideas, get rid of the computer, get rid of the realism, and just go for it.

That's mad.

It's facing him now. I know what I think.

What are some of the thoughts that you're having when you look at the face?

Wow. It's larger than life size, slightly larger. It's really impressive.

All right, I'm coming around. This is f***ing incredible.

Yeah. I don't know what to say. I'm a fair weather fan. I used to go, oh, we're boring your audience. Let's move on. Yeah.

See, I thought you looked like JFK. Here, touch it.

It's butter.

It's Naples yellow butter. You have a great open collar, a T-shirt.

You look like a statesman, actually.

Well, I'm a huge fan of butter sculpture being from the Midwest. Oh, that's right. Yeah. We have in Wisconsin, there's a whole tradition of it. I'm mad for it. I also look at ice sculptures. A corn sculpture is a big favorite of mine. This is just lovely. I think it's just lovely. I want to touch it a lot. I'm going to touch it a little. Put his head next to it.

Let me get my phone and take its picture.

And I'll make you famous or something.

Well, I think it's a great, quiet, mute, stately object.

Wow.

God, you're a bigger man than I am. Is there a way to preserve this? Apparently, we have a couple of hours. Okay. I want you to document it. Because it'll get better. It'll get much better as it loses its structural integrity and becomes more abstract and melts. There's an artist named Urs Feinstein. Yeah.

A Swiss visual artist. And put in candle sculptures. Wow. Huge melted candle sculptures. Right. Document that. You'll get famous. And you can get the hell out of the podcast game.

You got that for free. You didn't need anything. You just needed your beautiful self and art.

Follow me at Jerry Salts. I did this by accident. A student signed me up for it, gave me the password, which I don't even know. I accidentally cannot get on the Twitter or the Facebook. No, I can't get on Facebook. You were banned from Facebook at one point. Right. I had over a half million followers. I have like six or seven hundred thousand now. But who's counting?

But I am because it's all I have.

For me, my second self. is my first self. And what I mean by that is my life is so boring and so limited. I see 25 or 30 shows a week, painting shows, sculpture shows at museums, galleries, alternative spaces in New York. And then I go home and I become terrified that I have to write about these.

I've not gone out to dinner with anybody in decades because I'm a social misfit on the one hand and have nothing to talk about. I would sit next to you, a big wig. Oh, yeah. No, you are. The wig is large. And I would say... what art shows have you seen? And you would say, I haven't seen anything. And then I would sit in silence. So I stopped going.

And my wife is the co-chief art critic for The New York Times. A true bigwig, by the way. A true bigwig. She is the real deal. If you want to read art criticism, read Roberta Smith. I'm sorry I'm such a slow talker, but I'm from the Midwest. And so our lives together are at home in fear, getting ready to write, sitting down, writing, writing, writing, and then going out and seeing more shows.

So my online life is... is where all my fun is. It's where all my talk is. So why were you suspended from Facebook? Well, in around 2015, I was posting a lot of medieval manuscripts which had been... digitalized and rediscovered and were being seen for the first time. A lot of these are very violent, or the ones I would post.

And I would post like a woman having her breasts cut off, a man being castrated. And I would make some wise guy comment like, you know, this is 13th century, this is 8th century, and me coming into your studio if your work is no good. And it turned out that I was not violating any rules of the community. I got a lot of correspondence from Facebook.

They said thousands of people from the art world protested.

It's great art.

Great art. Right. but with my unfortunate commentary seemed, and this was just after Trump won the first Trump regime, and Me Too had just gotten going, And at first, I didn't listen. I said, come on, this is great art. But after a while, they suspended me. And then I got back on after 30 days. But I also rethought it.

I thought, if there's enough people telling me this is uncomfortable for them, I trust that. Men know f**k. nothing, about anything. We barely have an inner life. We think about seeing women naked. This is a straight man. We think about seeing a woman naked. We think about abstract problems like, will there be time travel? And we think about traffic.

Yeah, see?

I graduated at the bottom of my enormous high school class. I come from a very dysfunctional, suburban Chicago family. I had rented an apartment in the city. The night I graduated high school, my parents didn't bother coming to our graduation. I came home, handed them my diploma, and I left home, and I moved into that apartment. I barely went back ever. ever again.

I only know how to use Instagram because a student signed me up and I lost my password. But as long as I can stay logged in, I love it. I don't know how to do anything, though. Like if I had to post this, I'm unable to do it.

We were friends, but I just didn't care about them. They didn't care about me. It was all fine. I became an artist. I never went to school. Anybody listening to this, I am a much bigger loser than even you. I have no degrees, never went to school. I really don't know anything. I became an artist. I moved to New York when I was 27.

The same demons that you have, like before I came in here or last night, that said, what are you doing? You can't do this. You don't know what you're doing. I mean, you're pulling the wool over everybody's eyes. You have a bad neck or whatever it is. That is so far all true. All those things I listened to. And I self-exiled from the art world and I became a long-distance truck driver.

That is an absolute sh** work of art because it looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy. It's crap.

I still hung out in the art world. I would work for a couple of weeks. I would drive from New York to Florida or to Texas, occasionally to California. Did you have a handle like the CB? It was the Jewish Cowboy. And I would get on the CB and I would go, Shalom, partner. Let's talk about the late work of Richard Serra. And none of them ever spoke to me.

Either I'm a slow talker or they just recognized a rube. I did this for 10 years. All I did was drive back and forth. I never went anywhere. I never talked to anybody. I met a prostitute once, and she said, you want a date? And I got terrified, and I ran back to my hotel room in Jacksonville, Florida. That was on the third day I went to work.

And I swore that from now on, I would sleep with every prostitute. And I never met another one. As you can see, I don't put off the vibe. I don't have the sex vibe. You're good looking. People look at you and they want you. I'm old and short and bald and wear glasses that you don't know what it was like.

Yeah, nothing. And then I became so desperate and so lonely, I thought, I can't do this anymore. And I thought, what could I do? And I thought, I'll become an art critic. Now, at that point, I had never written a word in my life. I didn't read. I did nothing. I thought, oh, critics could get famous, sleep with women, and make a lot of money.

None of those things are possible, being an art critic, at all. I was going to say. No. So I became an art critic, and I started writing absolute bullshit. And people seemed to like it. I would write, the late commodified object of post-structuralist capitalism finds its liminal space between interrogating nature and culture, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, and which you should never use. Anyway, so I started writing that way and slowly, I found my own voice. And at 41, I began working. So all of you listening to this, you haven't even begun yet. Get your acts together, you big babies. It's hard. No one said it's going to be easy. You have to work, work, work, work, work, and you have to show up. I'm afraid you can't be like me and hang back.

I didn't hang back then. As much as I was unfit to hang out, I did it. Every night, you have to sacrifice it all. You have to meet other people like yourself. You can't be a vampire alone. You have to have a coven, or whatever those things are called, and have each other to, otherwise you think you know things other people don't know, and that's unlikely. You know nothing.

And you just need to hang out, get to work, and work in your own voice. You have to make an enemy of envy. You cannot look out and have your eyes scanning the world and always be comparing yourself to others.

Well, I had... lit upon one giant project. I think in retrospect, it was to protect me from having to come up with a new idea every time out. I was going to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy, all 100 cantos or chapters. I was going to do 100 works on each of the 100 cantos and And it would be a 25-year project. I know, I'm nuts. It would be a 25-year project. That's incredible.

It began two days before Easter 1975, before everybody here was born. It was supposed to end on Easter the year 2000. Okay, that's...

Yeah, and I made it as far as the third canto. The work was well received. But as you know, with all the great stuff happening to you, how old are you? I am 39 years old. Already. You think I'm over the hill, I'm washed up.

Yeah, mine hurts, and I have aches and pains. Nothing will protect you. So all I can offer is to say to yourself, I'm not going to look at others, the accomplishment of others. I'm going to just look at myself. You are cause in the matter. You created your situation, not all of their success. So make an enemy of envy.

And it's like an old address or your... It's a thing that's very dear to me.

Anybody listening to this podcast will understand this. You would never look at every goddamn New York Jets game and say, they're so great. Oh my God, their offensive line is off the charts fantastic. No, love means also being critical. Movie critics aren't supposed to like everything. Wine writers don't love every wine. But for some reason... Art critics are expected to love everything.

It's a childhood resonance. Got it. Got it. I know what it is. It's okay.

I would say that we're living in a period of culture where criticism has seemed to leave the building, meaning that everyone's afraid. I know what we're afraid of. We're afraid of being called racist, sexist, homophobes, xenophobes. So what's happened... I think through a lack of nerve, but also a dramatic shift in what criticism is in the present. Now criticism holds things up.

We put this woman artist above us and we hold her up or that queer artist above us. I'm all for that. The art world had closed doors for 50,000 years. Where are all the Asian artists in Western art history? There aren't any because we didn't believe it was possible. I imagine sports is going through something similar but on a corporate level as it becomes more and more and more monetized.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, or whatever the number is, it's an obscene amount of money. It's offensive. You could fund every rape kit left languishing on the shelves in America for 10 years for that one painting. But on the other hand, somebody wanted the painting. You only need two people to bid on something. That's right. And I hate auctions, but I accept them as part of our current reality. On the other hand...

It leaves an opening for everyone else who isn't obsessed with money. We all want it. I get that. We're supposed to be jealous of everyone making $59 million. But it leaves an opening for art to get on with its business. And it's doing just great.

having huge hits of what Werner Herzog called ecstatic truths, which means opening spaces for consciousness to step outside yourself, to slow time down. There's still space for that, but not out there in the market.

I said it was s*** because, listen, I loved the Amy Sherald portrait of Michelle Obama, mind you. So these two paintings were presented at the same time. Kehinde Wiley's painting is s***. because it's photo realism. Good for photo realism. It projects an image, you get a picture, you project it, you paint it perfect, you send it to China, they can do it.

Kehinde has his studio fill in a cuckoo background and sets Barack on an African chair. I guess that's his contribution. And as a painting, it is completely unoriginal. As an image of Obama, it's unlike every other presidential portrait ever made. So it depends how I judge it as a thing, not as what the artist says it is. My wife says no artist owns the meaning of their own work.

In other words, each of us, as Oscar Wilde said, when we read a book, we're not reading the author. You're reading yourself. When you read Dante, you are reading yourself into Dante, into Shakespeare, into Mozart, into Jay-Z, into Beyonce, whoever. The other portrait was much better of Amy Sherald.

It's a pleasure. I love, I've heard of you. I was thrilled to come here, but I've never listened because I don't.

Bingo. And you know what? There are a lot of artists like that. I can tell you their names if you want to go. They will never make you go deep. What they'll make you do is they'll tell you what you already know and they'll tell you the same thing over and over again. And that's very reassuring. I don't look to art to be reassured. That's also saying, oh, a black woman could be Napoleon.

That's a cool thought, but it would be cooler if you could make it a cooler painting. And he can't do it. And other artists do. Do you know who Dwayne Wade is? I do not know. Who is Dwayne Wade? This is perfect.

So that's Dwayne Wade, great, great athlete.

That's true. It doesn't look anything like him. What I'll say is that is an absolute s***. work of art because it looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy and it's just got it there's nothing to it other than the pose so you want to and he looks like the rock He looks white, which is fine with me. But, you know, it has no character. It has no ambience.

Well, it's not that important to me. I can see that it could be important to people who worship that person. But I would remind all of those worshipers and fans that all the different pictures of Jesus that they've seen are equally realistic and equal fictions. that they're idealized or de-idealized, or maybe you like Francis Bacon's exploding Jesus. Maybe that speaks to you.

Yeah, we're the last of our kind. All these magazines, The New Yorker, New York. No one knows what we are. I don't know what we do. But what we do, we do better than everybody else until there's no more need for it. And then we'll just go away.

What this says is I wanted to be a realist sculptor, and I found a photograph, and I made it without paying much attention to it at all. other than the signature pose.

Yeah.

So in the next generation, we'll look at that sculpture and see metal. They won't see a person. They won't see a likeness. They'll see a material, and even the material isn't that interesting. Right, the bronze. That's all they're going to see. I promise you. It looks like a lot of... academic sculpture. You know, the mouth is open. I can see the teeth. Somebody got in there and filed them down.

Good on them. Good technique, I guess. That's good. I would pay $400 for that and put it in a backyard at best. There's nothing wrong with that. That's fun.

I'd love to hear it.

They have some sort of... It looks like art by committee. That's what it is. It looks like art by more than one person with no touch, no hand, only an idea. They're not even artists, those two guys. They're entrepreneurs. They're scammers. They don't know it. Listen.

To me, I allege that they might be scammers in this sense, that Oscar Wilde said all the worst poetry is sincere. So what? That they sincerely wanted to make this realistic. Good on them. I didn't take that away from them. I don't think it looks like anybody.

No, that's fine. Dwayne Reed liked it, and he's cool with it. And could they have made something magnificent? Yes, they could. But they could have also made something much worse. It could have been a piece of string, you know, tied to a chain, some bulls**t. That happens as well. So this is a happy medium between thinking and non-thinking that looks like a photograph in three dimensions.

I've stood there. I've posed with him. What I want to say is that some of the greatest sculpture ever made was made in Greece and Rome of athletes.

It's been a good run. That's all I'll say. It's been a great run. Yeah, it's like the New York Jets, you know. They have to completely rethink everything. We hate them and screw them. Yeah, yeah. Are you a sports fan? I am a big football fan and a baseball fan. I'm a Yankee fan and the Jets and Giants. And that's it. And I'm a huge F1 nerd since the TV show and the pre-pandemic and all of that.

Okay.

This... As much as I love the first Rocky movie.

Yeah, watch it. You know, it has a happy ending, whatever. But the point is, as a work of art... It only goes to the Wade Johnson place. You could put the name Wade Johnson on this. It would be the same. The pose has- Oh, the Dwayne Wade, you mean. The Dwayne Wade.

So this is another- Is that you? No. Oh, that's Sylvester Stallone. Ha ha ha ha! He's as tall as I am.

I love him.

He's a big Trump guy, but he's done good work. And you know what?

That's true.

All that's true. It's fine. You know, Dwayne Reed and that guy, they contributed a lot to the culture.

They should get statues of themselves.

You should. I just hope that yours will be better.

Can I see the close-up of the humunculus beneath him? Wow. Wow.

The figure underneath... Michael is great, and he's got an extra face. His face has fallen off. It's like an arm with, like, 70 figures. I mean, here's what's great. The pose of this and the juxtaposition of the super realists, this is better for one reason. The idea of the Baroque means... The Baroque back in the 1600s was the invention of movies, of the cinematic, dramatic, melodramatic motion.

Action, action. This is an action shot. This is a frozen moment in time. The basketball is just on Michael's fingertips. His left hand is giving himself balance. His feet are spread out for maximum height and balance. The person underneath him becomes meaningless. Right, as if they are every person he's ever jumped over. It's you. That's mortal reality, immortal reality.

Again, the realism is what it is. That's not bad. He's like his hair under his arm. His lip is being clenched. He's like staring at the target. There's stuff going on there. Who made that one?

His holder work is better. Yeah.

And that's what makes you a great commentator and podcaster. You understand that. The quality has been determined in this case by the market picking something the market already picked.

Okay? And you're getting that self-reiterative quality. smoothing out and deadening that that will do.

I would call it a travesty of mimosas, meaning it doesn't look anything mimetic art because it doesn't look even remotely. They've taken a thin woman, a blonde, and made her into Gertrude Stein. And for that. That's kind of interesting. Or, you know, like a Russian policewoman. Yeah.

Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that.

If I were Brandy, I might be a little miffed, but... You know, I don't think athletes even think that way.

God. Yes, that's the grimace. I don't know where the grimace came from.

Well, yeah, you got it. It's a picture of Gary Busey. They could change it out.

I do know him.

Because soccer is a great sport and American men can... What? So this is... That could be a great piece of folk art. That is a great piece of f***ed up, super crazy, manneristic, meaning the neck is about a foot and a half long. The hair is standing up and out. The face is completely crooked. The eyes are asymmetrical.

He's looking at with sheer madness... I'd love to meet that artist.

That's well said. I think if we saw the picture of the artist, we don't know. But that is one great sculpture. Whoa. So you love this one. Not of Ronaldo. It is not Ronaldo. That's fine.

I would tell that artist to push all these ideas, get rid of the computer, get rid of the realism, and just go for it.

That's mad.

What do you think? It's facing him now. I know what I think.

What are some of the thoughts that you're having when you look at the face?

Wow. It's larger than life size, slightly larger. It's really impressive.

Yeah. I don't know what to say. I'm a fair weather fan. I used to go, oh, we're boring your audience. Let's move on. Yeah.

All right, I'm coming around.

Wow. See, I thought you looked like JFK. Here, touch it.

It's butter.

It's Naples yellow butter. You have a great open collar, a T-shirt.

You look like a statesman, actually.

Well, I'm a huge fan of butter sculpture being from the Midwest. Oh, that's right. Yeah. We have in Wisconsin, there's a whole tradition of it. I'm mad for it. I also looked at ice sculptures. A corn sculpture is a big favorite of mine. This is just lovely. I think it's just lovely. I want to touch it a lot. I'm going to touch it a little.

I'll put his head next to it. Let me get my phone and take its picture.

And I'll make you famous or something.

Well, I think it's a great, quiet, mute, stately object.

Wow.

God, you're a bigger man than I am. Is there a way to preserve this? Apparently, we have a couple of hours. Okay. I want you to document it. Because it'll get better. It'll get much better as it loses its structural integrity and becomes more abstract and melts. There's an artist named Urs Feinstein.

fisher yeah oh yeah a swiss visual artist and put in candle sculptures it's melt huge melted candle sculptures right document that you'll get famous and you can get the hell out of the podcast game oh god i uh i've learned i found out so much today jerry um

You got that for free. You didn't need anything. You just needed your beautiful self and art.

I will too.

Follow me at Jerry Salts. I did this by accident. A student signed me up for it, gave me the password, which I don't even know. I accidentally cannot get on the Twitter or the Facebook. No, I can't get on Facebook. You were banned from Facebook at one point. Right. I had over a half million followers. I have like six or seven hundred thousand now. But who's counting?

But I am because it's all I have.

The Pulitzer Prize for criticism and about, you know, three quarters of a million people.

For me, my second self. is my first self. And what I mean by that is my life is so boring and so limited. I see 25 or 30 shows a week, painting shows, sculpture shows at museums, galleries, alternative spaces in New York. And then I go home and I become terrified that I have to write about these.

I've not gone out to dinner with anybody in decades because I'm a social misfit on the one hand and have nothing to talk about. I would sit next to you, a big wig. Oh, yeah. No, you are. The wig is large. And I would say... what art shows have you seen? And you would say, I haven't seen anything. And then I would sit in silence. So I stopped going.

And my wife is the co-chief art critic for The New York Times. A true bigwig, by the way. A true bigwig. She is the real deal. If you want to read art criticism, read Roberta Smith. I'm sorry I'm such a slow talker, but I'm from the Midwest. And so our lives together are at home in fear, getting ready to write, sitting down, writing, writing, writing, and then going out and seeing more shows.

So my online life is... is where all my fun is. It's where all my talk is. So why were you suspended from Facebook? Well, in around 2015, I was posting a lot of medieval manuscripts which had been... digitalized and rediscovered and were being seen for the first time. A lot of these are very violent, or the ones I would post.

And I would post like a woman having her breasts cut off, a man being castrated. And I would make some wise guy comment like, you know, this is 13th century, this is 8th century, and me coming into your studio if your work is no good. And it turned out that I was not violating any rules of the community. I got a lot of correspondence from Facebook.

They said thousands of people from the art world protested.

Great art. Right. but with my unfortunate commentary seemed, and this was just after Trump won the first Trump regime, and Me Too had just gotten going, And at first, I didn't listen. I said, come on, this is great art. But after a while, they suspended me. And then I got back on after 30 days. But I also rethought it.

I thought, if there's enough people telling me this is uncomfortable for them, I trust that. Men know f**k. nothing, about anything. We barely have an inner life. We think about seeing women naked. This is a straight man. We think about seeing a woman naked. We think about abstract problems like, will there be time travel? And we think about traffic.

I graduated at the bottom of my enormous high school class. I come from a very dysfunctional, suburban Chicago family. I had rented an apartment in the city. The night I graduated high school, my parents didn't bother coming to our graduation. I came home, handed them my diploma, and I left home, and I moved into that apartment. I barely went back ever. ever again.

I only know how to use Instagram because a student signed me up and I lost my password. But as long as I can stay logged in, I love it. I don't know how to do anything, though. Like if I had to post this, I'm unable to do it.

We were friends, but I just didn't care about them. They didn't care about me. It was all fine. I became an artist. I never went to school. Anybody listening to this, I am a much bigger loser than even you. I have no degrees, never went to school. I really don't know anything. I became an artist. I moved to New York when I was 27.

The same demons that you have, like before I came in here or last night, that said, what are you doing? You can't do this. You don't know what you're doing. I mean, you're pulling the wool over everybody's eyes. You have a bad neck or whatever it is.

All those things I listened to. And I self-exiled from the art world and I became a long-distance truck driver. I still hung out in the art world. I would work for a couple of weeks. I would drive from New York to Florida or to Texas, occasionally to California. Did you have a handle like the CB? It was the Jewish Cowboy. And I would get on the CB and I would go, Shalom, partner.

That is an absolute sh** work of art because it looks like a little mini statue on an idiotic store-bought trophy. It's crap.

Let's talk about the late work of Richard Serra. And none of them ever spoke to me. Either I'm a slow talker or they just recognized a rube. I did this for 10 years. All I did was drive back and forth. I never went anywhere. I never talked to anybody. I met a prostitute once, and she said, you want a date? And I got terrified, and I ran back to my hotel room in Jacksonville, Florida.

That was on the third day I went to work. And I swore that from now on, I would sleep with every prostitute. And I never met another one. As you can see, I don't put off the vibe. I don't have the sex vibe. You're good looking. People look at you and they want you. I'm old and short and bald and wear glasses that you don't know what it was like.

Yeah, nothing. And then I became so desperate and so lonely, I thought, I can't do this anymore. And I thought, what could I do? And I thought, I'll become an art critic. Now, at that point, I had never written a word in my life. I didn't read. I did nothing. I thought, oh, critics could get famous, sleep with women, and make a lot of money.

None of those things are possible, being an art critic, at all. I was going to say. No. So I became an art critic, and I started writing absolute bullshit. And people seemed to like it. I would write, the late commodified object of post-structuralist capitalism finds its liminal space between interrogating nature and culture, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, and which you should never use. Anyway, so I started writing that way and slowly, I found my own voice. And at 41, I began working. So all of you listening to this, you haven't even begun yet. Get your acts together, you big babies. It's hard. No one said it's going to be easy. You have to work, work, work, work, work, and you have to show up. I'm afraid you can't be like me and hang back.

I didn't hang back then. As much as I was unfit to hang out, I did it. Every night, you have to sacrifice it all. You have to meet other people like yourself. You can't be a vampire alone. You have to have a coven, or whatever those things are called, and have each other to, otherwise you think you know things other people don't know, and that's unlikely. You know nothing.

And you just need to hang out, get to work, and work in your own voice. You have to make an enemy of envy. You cannot look out and have your eyes scanning the world and always be comparing yourself to others.

Well, I had... lit upon one giant project. I think in retrospect, it was to protect me from having to come up with a new idea every time out. I was going to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy, all 100 cantos or chapters. I was going to do 100 works on each of the 100 cantos and And it would be a 25-year project. I know, I'm nuts. It would be a 25-year project. That's incredible.