Reading the Art World: Jerry Saltz
A conversation with Jerry Saltz about his new book Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclast, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Jerry Saltz is the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and a 2019 National Magazine Award. He is the Senior Art Critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture. In his writings for the Village Voice, Vulture, NY Magazine, the NY times, his lectures, talks, videos and posts, Jerry champions artists that have been too-long overlooked and those who are long—celebrated and he doesn’t hesitate to call out the most pressing political, societal and cultural crises of our times. The through line in his writing is art—and the ways it can inspire and change lives.
Jerry talks about creativity saying:
“Demons will speak to you. They speak to everybody. And my simple advice to everybody is ‘grow up, you big baby.’ You are going to hear these voices. Nobody can say anything worse to you than you didn't say to yourself today. Nobody can lay you lower than you do. So in a way, they got nothing on you. So I do think that every artist, every writer, every creative person has to become comfortable with being this uncomfortable."
And on beginning his career in art criticism:
“I taught myself to write by reading Artforum when I was a long-distance truck driver and I didn't understand one word of what I read. Still, I've never missed an issue. But I knew I couldn't write in that voice. I tried, and I sounded like an idiot because I don't know all that translated theory from the 1980s that had been written in the 1970s. I couldn't write like that, so I started writing in my own dumb, beautiful, quirky, generic, whatever voice I have. I want the art world to be like great, what we used to call, telephone conversations, or late night in a bar conversations."
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Learn more about Reading the Art World here.