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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Okay. It's very dear to me. It's a childhood resonance. Got it. Got it. I know what it is. It's okay.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
Showing 501–520 of 592 · page 26 of 30
← Previous
Next →