Jerry Saltz Quotes

The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890?

I wasn't sure pop art or my work would last more than six months.

The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.

The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation.

Mr. Koons's work has always inspired architects, which I think is very interesting. I think he is an artist who has reinvented himself so many times and reinvented so many different series.

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.

A good artist is willing to die many times over. What's funny is, I've died so many times.

I see artists bored by light-without-heat, irked at gigantic galleries' pushing out art-as-product, leaving behind the over determined for the undetermined, guided by interior voices and bringing us out of a long tunnel to new blueness.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.

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

The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.

That's what you want to do as an older artist - you want to reinvent, but there has to be that vein in there for why people were listening to you before in the first place.

It's funny: when you're an artist, your own work goes in and out of fashion with you.

I think there's, you know, somewhere inside of us there's that - that fear of one day waking up and, you know, the fans - the fans move on to the next band or something.

The ballet world I don't think is an art form that is quick to change or to adjust or evolve.

Some people end up becoming just a conservator of the one thing they did and making sure they get their merch out and all that.

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

Imagine a master painting that's never finished...when you can only build on previous work, you become limited by what you can paint...If you are in the midst of painting a forest full of tall tress and hanging vines, it is rather difficult to wake up the next day and suddenly turn that paining into the beach and ocean...We have to treat each day like a black canvas on which we can paint. Yesterday might have been paining flowers, but today you can paint cars or horses. A new day represents a chance for renewal.

Because people really got tired, too, of the same old formatted sort of thing, and the same old formatted music.

Every time I've made a radical change it's helped me feel buoyant as an artist

As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.