Jerry Saltz
speaker
592 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 10 Jul
Jerry Saltz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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