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Jerry Saltz

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Jerry Saltz, New York’s senior art critic, is the author of the New York Times best seller How To Be an Artist and has won two ASME awards and the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.

  1. year in culture 2017
    The 10 Best Art Achievements of 2017Artists from Kara Walker to Jonathan Horowitz address the Trump era with fire and fury.
  2. tributes
    I Wish This Tribute to Oscar Wilde Could Remain in New York ForeverThis enchanted mise-en-scène is devoted to Wilde’s tragic last chapter: his trial and imprisonment for homosexuality, followed by his death in exile.
  3. Jerry Saltz: Christie’s Says This Painting Is by Leonardo. I Really Doubt It.One look at this painting tells me it’s a sham.
  4. Michelangelo Exploded Art History, Just With His DrawingThe Metropolitan Museum’s new show is a stupendous metaphysical-visual exhalation.
  5. We Can Now Divide Art History Into Before Linda Nochlin and AfterThe late critic’s 1971 essay blew through the gates of art-world patriarchy.
  6. art
    Radical in Content, Retrograde in Form: What Should We Make of ‘Trigger’?I wish I didn’t feel as conflicted as I do about this show that surveys “gender beyond the binary.”
  7. art review
    The Fearless Chris Ofili Enters His Own Personal Paradise LostThe four paintings are hung behind a cage of cyclone fencing.
  8. Three-Sentence Reviews: Peter Saul, Trevor Paglen, and 7 MoreThank God for Peter Saul.
  9. art review
    Kara Walker’s New Show Is the Best Art Made About This Country in This CenturyIt’s extraordinary to see an artist responding so well to the incredible political storm blowing all around us.
  10. 10 Thoughts About the New York Times’ Mark Grotjahn ProfileNone of this has anything to do with art.
  11. Jerry Saltz: I Give In, MoMA. You’ve Won Me Over. (Halfway, Anyway.)MoMA has been this broken spatial matrix since November 4, 2004, the day it reopened with great fanfare.
  12. Looking for New Electricity in the Mostly Static Art WorldIt’s not a matter of art being becoming more political. But the more I look for signs of artistic vitality, the more frustrated I’ve become.
  13. art fairs
    Jerry Saltz: The Drawing I Can’t Stop Thinking About From Frieze New YorkA great work of art from 1875 that’s never been seen in any museum.
  14. Right Now Is a Blockbuster Moment in New York for Female ArtistsNow let’s see if we can keep it up.
  15. How to Navigate an Art Fair With Jerry Saltz▶️ Nobody can do it like Jerry.
  16. Vito Acconci, 1940–2017He was the art world’s man in black, our mysterious you-want-it-darker Vito di Milo.
  17. Glenn O’Brien and the Avant-Garde That LostThree Sundays ago, I went to the beautiful memorial for the great writer-impresario-thinker Glenn O’Brien, and a melancholy thought took hold of me.
  18. art and design 2017
    Jerry Saltz Reviews Jerry Saltz: A Critic Looks at His Own Early ArtworkBefore I became a critic, I was an artist, and in the early 1970s, I feverishly devoted myself to illustrating the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
  19. feature
    Jerry Saltz: My Life As a Failed ArtistDecades after giving up the dream for good, an art critic returns to the work he’d devoted his life to, then abandoned — but never really forgot.
  20. remembrances
    In Remembrance of James Rosenquist: 1933 – 2017The first-rank Pop Artist has died.
  21. art
    The 2017 Whitney Biennial Is the Most Politically Charged in DecadesThe first, last, and only Hillary Clinton biennial.
  22. art
    The Most Memorable Thing I Saw at the Art Fairs: The Photographs of Aneta BartosThese haunted, staged photographs of the artist partially clad in bra and panties or camisoles with her Speedo-wearing, bald, bodybuilder father.
  23. Can Bad Art Be Made Good by Changing Political Times? The Case of Robert LongoLongo’s sculptural excess and atrociousness speaks new languages and is more acrid than ever.
  24. Andrea Rosen Has Decided to Close Up Shop. This Is a Major Loss.Rosen gave us Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Currin, and Wolfgang Tillmans — who together invented the 1990s art world.
  25. art in our time
    What Photography Can Learn From Danny Lyon in the Age of TrumpMost people have never heard of one of the most powerful and political photographers in history, Danny Lyon.
  26. art
    The Artwork That Jerry Saltz Can’t Stop Thinking AboutGlenn Ligon’s conceptualist text piece is neither protest nor poetry.
  27. Staring at Trump’s Body, What Do You See?Artist Jonathan Horowitz takes us on a journey into the metaphysics of the president’s great, somewhat mysterious, half-beast behemoth bulk.
  28. Richard Prince Just Showed How Art Fights Trump“This is not my work. I did not make it. I deny. I denounce. This fake art.”
  29. What 2017 Needs From the Art World: A Commitment to New ArtAs a critic, I need to make a commitment to the art of this moment. I want the art world as a whole to do the same.
  30. James Rosenquist: A Correction.
  31. Eric Fischl’s New Master Portrait of AmericaLooking at it, I felt like I had fallen through a trapdoor.
  32. Considering the Ankara Assassination Photos As History PaintingWhat makes these pictures so different from all of the other pictures of death that we see?
  33. year in culture 2016
    The 10 Best Art Shows of 2016What art and which artists had inklings we were entering a paradigm shift?
  34. Andreas Gursky Predicted the Future — and PresentArtists often channel the future.
  35. This Francis Picabia Retrospective Is a Call to MutinyPicabia wakes the polis.
  36. art
    This Post-Election Pain Is Good, At Least for ArtAlienation is the wellspring of art; in fact, feeling alone is often why you become an artist.
  37. art
    The Painting That Jerry Saltz Can’t Stop Thinking AboutKerry James Marshall’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Shadow of His Former Self fires like a time bomb in the mind.
  38. What’s Up With the PsychoBarn on the Met Roof?Transitional Object is made entirely from a cut-up and reconfigured decaying barn from Schoharie, New York.
  39. art review
    Matthew Barney’s 1991 Show Is Better TodayAt the Gladstone Gallery, you can go back 25 years and witness the event that completely shattered the art world.
  40. With ‘An Occupation of Loss,’ Taryn Simon Brings You Face-to-Face With DeathThis is a universal language of loss and inconsolability.
  41. art
    The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary ArtIts terms are so specialized and vague they’re only useful to those in the know.
  42. fall preview 2016
    What Vulture’s Critics Are Most Excited for This FallTheir top five picks for the season.
  43. Dying Gaul Is a World Masterpiece About DeathYou knew this sculpture before you saw it.
  44. Never Has My Breath Been Taken Away Like It Was at Knockdown CenterI thought I knew what’s what in much of New York.
  45. Canada’s Great Painting Show Is a Tipping PointThe show has me worried about the fate of the Lower East Side.
  46. Jerry Saltz on Alex Israel and the Art World’s Latest Way of Eating Its YoungGoing straight into the money leaves artists with no future.
  47. See Philip Guston Totally Reinvent the Sublime“Every real painter wants to be a realist,” he said.
  48. Morley Safer Once Sent Me His Strange PaintingsI didn’t hate them.
  49. art appreciation
    This 8-Foot Candle Portrait Mesmerized MeJerry Saltz on Urs Fischer’s giant wax sculpture of artist-director Julian Schnabel.
  50. art
    The Reviled Identity Politics Show That Forever Changed ArtHow identity politics became for this era what Impressionism and Cubism were for theirs.
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