Jerry Saltz Quotes

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.

What's called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I've become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.

Fairs are beneath the dignity of art. To stand there in a booth and hawk your wares - it is just not how you sell art.

People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

Art should be able to be innovative without compromising itself. That's why I believe artists should have bigger preoccupations than checking the price tags on their work or becoming curators' darlings.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

Artists are free to push boundaries to make art. But when pushing boundaries is their only aim, the result is usually bad art.

I think you just have to cross your fingers that there's enough artists out there that keep producing interesting work, and eventually it will form a kind of wave that will force people to pay attention to it.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.

When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.

Artists change how we see the world - and that can have value in the way people do business.

I don't want to sound like an aesthete, but one has to be true to the art. And that means being true to the tradition of the art but also being true to your own artistic vision.

The arts are a response to our individuality and our nature and help to shape our identity. The arts are not a frill and should not be treated as such.

I think art maybe has just become very consumer-oriented, and maybe it's always been that way because it is a business.

I simply loathe the crude 1960s distinctions between commerce and art. For me, Warhol and pop obliterated all of those separations - that was the whole point of the Brillo Boxes and Campbell's Soup Cans. And believe it or not, in 2009, moronic journalists are still saying to me, 'Your work is so commercial.'

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before.

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.