Quotes from Jerry Saltz

Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect.

Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.

A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.

When art wins, everyone wins.

There are many, many art worlds. Art contains multitudes.

Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.

Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on Art.

All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places.

Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.

I don't want to hear at all what the artist thinks about his art. And I'm not writing for the artist. I'm writing for the reader, and I want to tell the reader what I think.

To me, the building [of Museum of Arts and Design]now looks like a lovely jewel box, and the tiled façade reminds me of a heat shield.

Craft is not a category; it's a means. The folks running the museum [Museum of Arts and Design]are sharp, and they know this, but they are in a bind.

Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.

I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money.

When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.