Jerry Saltz Quotes

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.

All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy.

I really like the pop culture materials of everyday life, but used in some way that elevates them to something you notice and care about.

Basic Instinct 2' is an uneasy experience because, although it is hyper-reflexive to the point where it is hard to think of one character, one scene, one plot twist that isn't a reference or an echo, there is nothing knowing about it. No matter how absurd the film gets, it refuses to raise its eyebrows.

Mystery Science Theater is really a postmodern show, it's really derived of many influences.

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

When I read 'Planet Terror,' it was like nothing I had ever read before remotely, and yet it has so many references.

Warhol was definitely an inspiration when I was younger. I wouldn't quantify his sort of influence. I've been influenced by nature and science, and I've been influenced by people like Ernst and Rauschenberg, Cornell and Bosch and Bruegel, by writers like Haruki Murakami to Pablo Neruda to Artaud.

I don't like the ironic tone that our pop culture, in the world, has taken. Everything is 'ironic.' Everything is 'cool.'

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

I really appreciate artists of the 20th century, and I can see a lot of their influence on my work, but to suggest that my design only fits within an 'ism' kind of bothers me.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

Take an exhibit, in the days when we saw the Pop art - Andy Warhol and all that - tomato soup cans, etc., and coming home, you saw everything like A. Warhol.

Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?

I love the way capitalism finds a place - even for its enemies.

I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.