Jerry Saltz Quotes

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!

My goal is to change the art industry.

If you get stuck, draw with a different pen. Change your tools; it may free your thinking.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

We don't know what the next generation of art is going to look like. We're kind of making it up as we go along. Not unlike the tech industry.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.

When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o'clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory.

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

One can rightly speak of an evolution in plastic art. It is of the greatest importance to note this fact, for it reveals the true way of art - the only path along which we can advance.

You really can't bring about anything new with art.

The conventional notions of art have changed, and a lot of things done today are considered works of art that would have been rejected in the past.

I feel like every artist has an opportunity to create something new and to challenge themselves to reach out to a new crowd.

The great art of the past became great because it started to go out of the perimeters that defined art and defined new territories.

For me, as an artist, I think you have to experiment.

You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.