Pulitzer Prize-winner Jerry Saltz (How to Be an Artist), senior art critic for New York magazine, likes to speak in superlatives. Jeff Koons's Puppy is "the greatest control-freak sculpture ever created." Jasper Johns's Flag is "the most iconic, transgressive object/amulet in late-twentieth-century American art." Here's one about Saltz, inspired by the caliber of his writing and observations in Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night: he's the best art critic working today.
The book's 80-odd essays span 1999 to 2021. Surely two decades of rigorous engagement with art should guarantee an abundance of insight from any critic, but there's no one quite like Saltz. There are his whammo openers ("Two weeks ago, the Death Star that has hovered over the art world for the last two years finally fired its lasers"). There's his peppery-salty wit ("For nearly ten years, starting in the late nineties, art and money had sex in public. Lots of it. And really publicly"). There are his cross-genre comparisons placing fine art in a larger--some purists would say cruder--cultural context ("Hopper is the Leonard Cohen, Roy Orbison, and Bruce Springsteen of painting, an only-the-lonely artist of ordinary life").
Also distinguishing Saltz is the personal aspect he brings to many assignments. As he explains, "I want critics to be as radically vulnerable in their work as I know artists are in theirs." This remark comes from the book's heartbreaker of an opener, "My Life as a Failed Artist," in which Saltz charts his woebegone younger-days attempt to make it as a visual artist. His hard-won humility reveals itself in his willingness publicly to revise his opinions, as of Cindy Sherman: his judgment was reversed "one evening in January 1990... when I saw Sherman explode her own formula." And does the reader detect a slight curdling of Saltz's affection for frequent Art Is Life touchstone Jeff Koons toward book's end?
Saltz's most rebellious act may be his determination to write accessibly in a field that tends toward easily satirizable impenetrability. His approach has always been fuss-free: as he writes of starting out as a critic, "I knew I wanted to write about art that I was seeing in the present and didn't want to have to read all those books that all those critics were always referencing." Who needs "all those books" now that there's Art Is Life? --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Art Is Life presents two decades of rigorous engagement with art by sui generis Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jerry Saltz.