In an article in
Artnet 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's "Babylon" as well as other wide ranging systemic metaphors for the art world.
On a College Art Association panel in February 2007, Saltz commented, "We live in a Wikipedia 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."
His humor, irreverence, self-deprecation and volubility have earned him the designation as the Rodney Dangerfield 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 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 Award for art criticism from the College Art Association.
Facebook
Saltz uses social networking website Facebook 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 of 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, "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."
He's used his page to defend the use of irony in art, arguing against adherents of "the New Seriousness" who he calls the "Purity Police."
In 2010 artist Jennifer Dalton 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, 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.”
Work of Art
Saltz served as a judge in the Bravo series
The Next Great Artist which premiered on June 9, 2010.
Book Announcement
In early August of 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. Salts encouraged submissions from guest artists, critics, curators, and dealers 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 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 a John Cheever short story called "The Swimmer," 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.
