An artwork is supposed to delight, stimulate, and give joy. Ania Diduch talks to the New York critic Jerry Saltz about the essence of art.
They say New York never sleeps, but they do not say why. The 2023 answer to this phenomenon is simple to the point of being disappointing: New Yorkers never fall asleep because they drink billions of gallons of coffee. So does Jerry Saltz. An art critic and author of two books on the dynamics of the art world, he injects himself with at least 150 ounces of coffee a day. The investment pays off: when he isn’t drinking black magic, he’s roaming the country, visiting art exhibitions, writing, or posting on his Instagram account (with over 600,000 followers). He jokes about his coffee addiction, kneels in front of his favorite paintings, takes a lot of selfies, and encourages artists to believe in the power of their creativity by posting compelling mindset tips. He is as approachable as it gets, and his digital presence almost identically matches his real-life personality. The difference is, he is much funnier in person.
Ania Diduch: I wanted to ask you about the healing and transformative power of art. After all, it is because of art that you found drive after years of struggling as a painter and truck driver.
Jerry Saltz: Art changed my life a few times. The first time was in Paris, in the seventies. I was nineteen years old—my first time in Europe. I laid eyes on a painting that seemed the sum of all things. It was a cosmograph perpetual motion machine. I was standing in front of The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault. Something like Krakatoa went off within me. I felt the gravitational field of my life shifting forever. A portal opened. A month later, my mother committed suicide. The portal slammed shut. I never looked at art again. Until I did.
That’s the story you wrote about in the first chapter of your new book, Art Is Life. You were traveling through Europe to Poland with your Polish girlfriend to sell jeans on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Did you end up actually selling anything?
I did. I sold them in Warsaw. We got there—Basia and I—on a train. There were open squares in the city where tiny little capitalist stalls were installed. One sold pants, another sold T-shirts, and so on. We ended up selling Levi’s jeans. I should add there was no real profit involved, but it was fun.
Let’s get back, please, to the healing power of art.
Well, in the last 170 years, we have treated art as a noun. As a thing being hung at the center of a white wall at an exact, curated height above floor level, in a space called a gallery or a museum. While, in reality, for 5,500 years, art was a verb: it was an event that was doing something to people. It could cast spells; stop you from getting pregnant; it could protect your army; curse somebody. Art was a way to communicate with the ancestors or gods or be a passage to the afterlife. The paintings inside of ancient Egyptian sarcophagi were never meant to be seen by human eyes—they were painted either for the dead or for the gods of the afterlife. So, if you are asking if art can heal you, I would answer that art can produce real vibrations that give you agency; bliss; joy; pleasure. All those things can make you stop and make you experience the density and poetry of being alive. What is more, I believe that pleasure is an important form of knowledge. Contemporarily, we discount that in Western civilization. If something is fun or pleasurable—it is bad.
I think pleasure is misunderstood as superficial.
Yes, it is connected to bodily experience, while knowledge is supposedly exclusively a feature of the mind. To me, art puts the mind and the body back together.
There are scientific findings that support the idea that the interconnection of mind and body is much more complex than we ever considered. Our cells are listening to our thoughts and vice versa.
Exactly. I don’t think you can have a thought without having a feeling, and I don’t think you can have a feeling without having a thought. I am also a believer of an unpopular and, colloquially speaking, “mumbo-jumbo” idea that art is part of a cosmic force, and that it is a force that uses us humans to reproduce itself by engaging our thoughts and influencing our actions. Art was here from the beginning—it was never not here.
Is this controversial theory part of the reason you never host dinner parties at your home?
No, that is just part of being an American. We have millions of friends, we talk a lot, usually to make some money or to laugh, but we don’t often share an intimate meal together. Coffee—yes, if you are lucky. I actually have another unpopular theory: I believe that the first sculpture—The Venus of Willendorf—was made by a woman. There is something about the softness of how the stone was manipulated and the scale of it that inspires me to think that. But also statistics from the prehistoric period might support my standing. We now know that fifty-one percent of the handprints in all the caves are women’s hands.
If art is such a spiritual entity, is the institution of the art market and art history killing its essence?
Art and money have slept together since forever—it is nothing new. What is new is that we became cynical about it, because we see art more and more through the lens of obscene amounts of money. That prevents people from seeing the primal qualities of art that I have mentioned plus other features too, like the ugliness of it. Ninety-five percent of the art that is made and seen is just bad. And there is nothing wrong with that. Eighty-five percent of the art made in the Renaissance was crap. There’s more. When you walk through the best museums and see fifteen percent of the best works that were made in history, you dismiss the majority of it. The paintings or the sculptures are just not resonating with you. It’s normal.
So no one is killing anyone—art needs the art market.
In my opinion, most of the collectors today are buying things that collectors in their nearest surroundings—collectors like them—already bought. That is how trends are made, and it has little to do with what the personal experience of art is for the general public.
Does this mean that, by copying other collectors’ tastes, people are moving away from their real experiences?
No. I believe they have very real experiences within the realm of following the trends. It is a little bit like me and my Gerhard Richter painting.
You have a Richter at your home? I am so jealous!
Oh, absolutely it is 100 percent fake. I cannot afford to buy the original Richter’s work, so I paid another artist to make an identical copy of the piece that I like. And then I get to live with this painting, and it makes me really happy. It does not depress me at all that someone else owns a hundred million dollar version of my painting.
So it also doesn’t bother you that the famous artist did not leave a trace of himself in the brush stroke that you are living with?
If you insist on art history terms then, yes, I have everything but the aura. (The concept of the aura of a piece of art was introduced by famous theorist Walter Benjamin). The copies of some of the famous paintings that I own, however, possess some of the qualities of the original work. For example, every time I walk by Damien Hirst’s dots painting in my apartment, I feel cheerful and light. That is a value. Getting back to your previous question: the problem is that people walk into a contemporary art gallery, and all they see is monetary value. That creates hierarchy; inequality.
And it alters the production of the art. Like the statue of a dead Picasso that was made this year at ARCO, Madrid’s contemporary art fair. It was a real-life size sculpture of Pablo Picasso lying on a stone pedestal. It was supposed to criticize the death of art as an independent discipline. A joke within the art market.
It is a gimmick. I laugh at it. Now, the real deal with art is what happens when we both look at one of the most famous of Picasso’s paintings, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: we are looking at the same piece, but we see two different paintings. That is beautiful and powerful.
I agree. Art works as the ultimate, outside-of-our-bodies proof that people are different from one another, and that it’s a strength. It’s a sphere in which we can see our differences.
That is because art is subjective. Your Picasso might be better for you than my Picasso is for me. Or your Hamlet is different for you every time you hear it. Or sometimes you go on for years, when Hamlet just does not sit well with you. Subjectivity gives agency, agency gives choice, freedom, and confidence. I believe people need to stay very open inside to all art. It is useful to keep in mind that, every time you are looking at a work of art or reading a play or a book, you are experiencing something that has never been seen or experienced before in the history of the world. It is beyond the qualification of whether it is good or bad.
Therefore, if someone feels intimidated by art because they think they don’t understand it, what are the steps they could take to experience the joy that it embodies?
First of all, art is not about understanding. When you hear Chopin or Mozart, you do not say “I don’t understand,” you simply experience the music. So we have to ask ourselves: “How am I experiencing this work of art?” And this perspective takes us back to art as a verb. What is art doing to me? Art should never intimidate you—it is just a piece of a cloth with seventeen colorful stripes on it. You may not like it—and that is it. Once you move away from the need of understanding, you ask yourself a bunch of questions. For example: what would I like about this painting or photograph or sculpture if I was the kind of person who liked it? This mental exercise creates a situation in which you take an attempt to expand your subjective sensitivity. Why would someone like Matisse? He was one of the most hated artists of his generation. Why? Because he changed the colors of the basic elements of the world. People would ask, “How could the sky be green?” The amazing thing is, still today, we still don’t know! Now, forgive me for the harsh change of subject: when we talk about the Holocaust, we need to have the respect of the inability to ever understand it—that it is beyond us. In the same way, some great art is beyond us. I am not comparing Matisse to the Holocaust, but embracing the limits of our perception and understanding is one of the goals of being intimate with art.
It is, then, about embracing the mystery too.
A paradox. Therefore, other questions and mental exercises I would recommend are to let go of control, consider that you may be wrong about someone’s intentions, and see, see, see as much art as humanly possible. You can never see too much! Reading helps too, but nothing beats listening to your experiences. The last (but not least) action I know to be helpful is to speak to a person next to you—without being an asshole. Saying something like: “I enjoy these orange stripes even though they are boring to me. What are you seeing?” Whatever I would say to you and you to me would eventually blow our minds. That is the power of subjectivity.
So art is an open-ended question.
It takes courage and guts to stay open. You may experience something—see, hear, talk about, and then forget about it. After two weeks or two years, it may come back to you and change your life. People think of art as a religion-like entity, a sphere that poses answers. Art poses questions. And what is even more intriguing is that you cannot prove that Vermeer is better than George W. Bush’s paintings. It is impossible to prove it. And I find Bush’s paintings quite interesting.
Jerry Saltz:
American historian and art critic. A columnist for New York Magazine, he received the Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his texts in 2018. He suspects—and says it out loud—that there is an artist in everyone.
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