Jerry Saltz > Quotes

“Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.”
― Jerry Saltz

“You are always learning. At the end of each day, you know something you didn't know at the beginning. We're all learning on the job. This is true even when the thing you've learned is that you know less than you thought.”
― Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist

“Bad art teaches you as much as good art, maybe more.”
― Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist

“But doubt is a sign of faith: it tests and humbles you, allows newness into your life. Best of all, doubt banishes the stifling effect of certainty. Certainty kills curiosity and change.”
― Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist

“For now, make something, learn something, and move on. Or you’ll be buried waist-deep in the big muddy of perfectionism.”
― Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist

“All art is a kind of exorcism. This is what gives art its power to change the conditions of our life.”
― Jerry Saltz, Art is Life: Icons & Iconoclasts, Visionaries & Vigilantes, & Flashes of Hope in the Night

“Surely, your crappy art can fake out twelve stupid people. I've seen it done with one or two.”
― Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist

“Every work of art is a culturescape of you, your memories, the moments you spent working, your hopes, energies, and neuroses, the times you live in, and your ambitions. Of the things that are engaging, mysterious, meaningful, resistant over time.”
― Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist

“Its visionaries are driven by a new and very different set of values. This work reminds us that the contemporary museum, long revered as an elite sanctuary, now beckons as a new commons: a town square, a venue for community building, even an agent of change. A major factor in this is the influence of social media—especially Instagram—with its effect of sidestepping gatekeepers and fostering ardent fandom, debate, cross-pollination, societal change, and a new kind of citizenship. The result has been a great opening, a time of schism and volatility, a feeling of dams bursting everywhere. Everyone felt they had a stake in whatever the future might hold. The art of these decades has shown us that the world didn’t begin long ago, but rather that each of us creates the world anew every day.”
― Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

“Artists must also reckon with the uncanny feeling that by the time we’ve finished a new work, we’ve often ended up creating something different from what we set out to do. This feeling of surprise, of the unexpected, can delight or disappoint us. … The creative process is an inexplicable, inspired, crystallizing place where the artist becomes an audience to the work, almost doesn’t know where it came from.”
― Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist

“Art is two parts agency and one part inner heat. The artist loves going down rabbit holes, working toward and against something at the same time, translating sensory and extrasensory impressions that all have their own sovereignty or joy, each of them on a journey to bring something back from a personal underworld, to build a new body out of disparate parts and materials. In this way, art is something like an undoing of death.”
― Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

“At the same time, art cannot be understood in terms of purpose. As the sculptor Charles Ray has said, art is “for absolutely nothing.” To make, or experience, art is to enter a kind of free zone; it slows us down, places us in some epistemological estuary, takes us into the wild. We make art from our flaws, fragilities, perversities, from our need to communicate or be entertained or stave off death, to create our own mating dances, to deliver our own children, to mourn. Art is bigger than mere subject matter. It is as big as life.”
― Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

“That day, as I contemplated the Medusa, I felt the shattering heartbreak of a long-forgotten memory. My mind carried me back to a moment when I was ten years old, left by my mother to wander alone in the Art Institute of Chicago, scared and confused, until a small colorful diptych by Giovanni di Paolo beckoned to me from across a gallery. A portal opened. A month later, my mother committed suicide. The portal slammed shut. I never looked at art again. Until I did. —”
― Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

“The first time the power of art pulled the rug out from under me, I was nineteen years old. It was the early 1970s. I was in Europe for the first time, on my way through Paris to Warsaw with my Polish girlfriend, on a bizarre quest to sell blue jeans behind the Iron Curtain. On that day, during my first pilgrimage to the Louvre, I laid eyes on a painting that seemed the sum of all things. It was a cosmographic perpetual motion machine, a purgatorial charnel house—as far from the warmth of any human sun as anything I’d ever beheld. The moment I saw it, something like Krakatoa went off within me. That painting was Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Standing before it, I felt the gravitational field of my life shift forever. The Raft of the Medusa is massive in scale, yet its subject matter is as simple as cows in a field, bathers by a river, or a birth in a manger. We see a large raft bearing a crowd of male figures, at the mercy of heaving seas. Their poses suggest a classical frieze, like Elgin marbles from hell—a collective ash heap of individually vivisected souls stripped bare of humanity. Each of the men is marked by a distinct, unforgettable gesture. Some are reckoning with their wounds; others seem to be coming to terms with death; some seem closer to damnation than to life. Every one of them appears hopeless. Our eyes are compelled by shafts of flickering phosphorescent light that rake at angles across the figures in the painting’s foreground, tracing its dark pyramidal structure. It’s a vision of jagged complexity and somehow also of profound grandeur.”
― Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

“The elephant in this big room, obviously, is context. In America, the twenty-first century began with the contested election of 2000, followed shortly thereafter by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. From there came the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial collapse of 2008, the lightning-rod election of the first black president, the rise of antidemocratic authoritarianism at the hands of his successor, and finally a second contested election and a worldwide pandemic that saw the death of one million Americans. All of which is to say: None of the art made in this period happened under “normal” conditions.”
― Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night