Jerry Saltz Quotes

I have an amazing wife and three beautiful children, and that certainly makes you less obsessive about your art as a musician - which I've always felt was more like painting than anything.

Nathan, how can you stand playing the same piece over and over again?" And Grandpa Nate answered, "Why don't you ask me how I can stand making love to the same woman over and over again?

Art is a jealous mistress.

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.

They are works of art that can be considered works of art but don't have to be in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.

Beijing is constructing a 100,000 m2 modern art museum, yet it will not feature any of my work.

Basically, I thought for a very long time that making music and art projects, that that was just something that I did, and real life was separate. And I'm starting to realize that the things that I do, making music and art and photography and all that, it's not just something that I do. It's who I am. So I don't think I'll ever be able to stop. It's like that curse that you live with, this thing that you love but you also hate it at the same time. It brings you a lot of joy but also a lot of heartbreak.

The reason these paintings are destined for New York is not because I am disappointed about a lack of German interest, but because MoMA asked me, and because I consider it to be the best museum in the world.

Obsession is beautiful. It's what makes art.

Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.

An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.

If you're serious about singing or acting, which are two art forms that get repetitive, the way to keep the music fresh is to recognize that it is totally impossible for it to ever be the same, night after night. You open your mouth and you'd like a certain sound to come out of it, but it doesn't always come out exactly like you thought it was going to come out!

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture.

There is no greater pleasure for me than to practice and exhibit my art.

I'd live in a museum if I could. I used to spend hours and hours in the Museum of Modern Art.