Jerry Saltz - Art Criticism

Art Criticism

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. Although he's defended the art market, he's also called out faddy market behavior and the fetish for youth, saying "the art world eats its young."

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.