Jerry Saltz is a major American art critic. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and columnist for New York magazine, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018. Concentrating on American art. Australia barely gets a mention if at all, although there are discussions of various Biennales etc. Jerry Saltz’s new book ART IS LIFE is a collection of roughly eighty essays by him, arranged chronologically from 1999 to 2021. The book is divided into four parts, with an introduction and essay about how Saltz turned to art criticism as a ‘failed artist’. Acknowledgements and a handy index are at the back.
It is eloquently, phenomenally well written. Be careful when turning the pages though – the paper is quite delicate and fragile.
What comes across is Saltz’s vehement advocacy of the relevance of art. We see how some prophetic, radical artists have chronicled and divisively represented the art of the times. Saltz writes about avante-garde heavyweights such as Marina Abramovic , Hilma af Klint, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Kara Walker and David Wojnarowicz, and attempts to analyse how contemporary art has mirrored and depicted the uneasy era between 9/11 and when Covid hit. Can art change the world?
Saltz’s main theme in a way is that art doesn’t have to make sense but is crucial to life . “It’s meaningless,” he writes, “to talk about ‘understanding’ Mozart, the Mona Lisa or the floating, fuzzy, Buddhist TV-screen paintings of Mark Rothko. We don’t ‘understand’ works of art in this way. We dive into them – ie our impressions and feelings count – do we like a particular work or not? Why /why not? Can this change over time?
Saltz is prepared publicly to announce his revised assessment, for example his thoughts about the works of Cindy Sherman. He was an early endorser of neglected female artists and the ground breaking work of LGBTQ+ , African American and other sidelined originators. He also writes, for instance, about the works of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Bill Traylor. The Ankara gallery assassination is mentioned as are the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. Mention is made of major New York Museums – Moma , the Met , the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim and their roles.
Saltz also has great fun noting the various influences sparking the works of the particular artist he is writing about – the cave paintings at Niaux were a blinding revelation for him and lead to ‘ all the art that would follow’, Dorothea Tanning apparently absorbed the works of “Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Bontecou, Francesca Woodman, and many more”, while Guston’s late figurative paintings impressed “Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, Albert Oehlen, Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Murray and Georg Baselitz”, to name but a few . Saltz also writes about how he was transformed by the works of Botticelli and Delacroix .
A fascinating, turbulent book.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612485/art-is-life-by-jerry-saltz/