How to Look at Art Like Jerry Saltz

Jerry Saltz is a lot of things: Respected and controversial art critic for New York Magazine; Instagram curator; former truck driver. He's the art world's favorite uncle, who gleefully doles out his opinion on everyone from Picasso to Kim Kardashian. He has limitless sass, energy far below his years, and buckets of wisdom—whether you're listening, or not.

As Saltz isn't literally my uncle, I don't get a yearly dose of his advice and ideologies during tumultuous Thanksgiving dinners. Instead, I trekked up to the 92nd Street Y for An Evening with Jerry Saltz on Wednesday night, where I was promised discourse on where art comes from, where it is now, and where it's going. Saltz' two-hour speech + takedown of museum architecture via slideshow + Q&A was kind of like downloading his Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds directly into your brain while surrounded by 200 other people doing the same.

The crowd skewed to middle-aged NPR-y folks, sprinkled with a couple dozen New Yorker tote-touting youth. After Saltz took the stage (ebulliently throwing down devil horns and shouting, "New York!"), he found by show of hands 70% of us were in the art world. "You poor bastards!" he giddily lamented.

Between 7:30 and 10:30, Saltz shared anecdotes from his relationship with art and his relationship with his wife, quotes from Oscar Wilde, impressions of Jeff Koons "like a permanent Ronald Reagan," tirades against cynicism, school, money, envy, early bedtimes, politicians, betrayal, pugs. Half an hour in he was sweating at the pits, red in the face, adjusting his belt, cracking his voice, every gesture oozing with passion.

"Art tells you things you didn't know you needed to know," is just one of the truisms that somehow feels new when delivered side-by-side with admonishments of "Richard Big Dick Serra," advice to stay out late with friends, spot on imitations of dogs and cats in support of an argument, assurance that, yes, you can take over the world—but it's up to you. "Each person has their own Hamlet, you motherfuckers!" is another one. He talks at a mile a minute, offering 10 words of warning and 1,000 words of encouragement. He's like an irreverent art Buddha, constantly spouting parables and proclamations, but adamant that he shouldn't be the one driving this car.

Saltz's journey from fledgling art student to clout-having art critic was long—he didn't put pen to art critique until his 40s—but he exudes urgency. "You must make an enemy of envy tonight." He insists at one point during the talk. There's no time to waste! Saltz, though, has spent his time accruing an encyclopedic knowledge of art history, to the point that one woman mentions her favorite painting is Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, and his gut reaction is a story about the artist's final days after painting it.

His stream-of-consciousness deviations from his notes—which constantly disappear and reappear throughout the talk—lead him through the well-trodden paths of his greatest and most controversial hits, from a defense of Kim Kardashian's selfie tome, Selfless, to a lavish appraisal of Charles Ray's nude sculpture of Huckleberry Finn and Jim, rejected by The Whitney. Both of these pieces trail dozens of comments bashing Saltz and calling him "witless," asking if his earnest opinions are satire, one starting with a flabbergasted, "W-u-u-u-t!"

The arguments that he's had to defend reinforce his own admission of fallibility. For all the advice he's giving to artists today, his own art career fell flat years ago, which he admits readily. "Do I make art today?" he responded to a question from The Creators Project. "Absolutely not." What follows are the opinions, advice, and anecdotes that stuck with me. Since he's an art critic who inherently trades in opinions, think of it as a review of the world at large.

In black and white cause @jerrysaltz is old AF. Great talk at @92ndstreety btw, I lol'd and learned #art #fart

A photo posted by Beckett Mufson (@beckettmufson) on Dec 9, 2015 at 7:21pm PST

"You have to go to a cave painting, it's a pilgrimage. I saw a small one in France… and I was thunderstruck. Instantaneously I knew that these paintings were by people who had been looking at animals for 100,000 years… Instantaneously I knew that these were observed images, that there was, in fact, perspective—supposedly invented in 1414 by Alberti and those guys in Florence. But it was there. The bigger animals were closer, the smaller animals were further away… I saw art, not weird magic."

"You have to understand that 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of all cave paintings exist today. We lost them… The caves are the first great storage systems. How can I get my idea, that lives only in me, goddamn it… How can I get the information stored so it can be retrieved in another operating system? You can't imagine how advanced this technology was. They were the computers of their time."

"What will an artist say when you tell them, 'You know how to do your work'? Wendy Goodman (Home Design Editor for NY Mag), what would you say?"

"I'd say, 'No I don't."

"No you don't! I don't! I don't know how to do my work. I don't know what I'm doing, is what you're saying, but I know how to do it. That's your work, there's no right and no wrong."

"[Humanity's] been through some hard times. Not just Donald Trump and Osama—but this is wild, I have to say. Go through an airport when Donald Trump is speaking. Anybody ever done that? It's wild. Every person in the the airport that's looking at the TV is going, 'HAHAHAHAHA!' He's the most alive, probably dangerous, the closest we've ever come to Nativism. Look up the word. It is Fascism. Trump's the closest America has ever gotten to Nativism, and we'll see. Up to you, younger people! Don't vote for Nader again! Feel the Bern, then do the right thing. As an older realist, who voted for Dick Gregory when I was your age, believe me… What am I doing… Where did my notes go… How do you lose notes on a stage?"

"This money thing has become a filter that we all see the art world through. And it's extremely real and totally illusory. We have no theory of the market. When we speak about the market, we get tired and depressed. 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of mostly white, male artists are the ones making the money. We obsess over them *fart noise.*"

"You must make an enemy of envy. You must make an enemy of envy tonight. Envy will eat you alive. I spent so many years, my loves, walking in New York, looking at every building going, 'Ugh! I should live there! Not that person!' Always looking up, always looking at what others had. You gotta stop that now! You gotta grow up! Get over it! You don't have a trust fund. Sorry!"

"You will take over the world with the artists you stay up late with. Vampires must be with other vampires. You must live with other vampires and exchange and develop new languages. It's absolutely crucial. Without that, you're nothing."

"The gangs you form must be loyal. There can be no space between you in public."

"If you don't like someone's biography, go ahead. But that's kind of boring to me, because you're putting Wagner off-limits to you, and that's a problem. If you can't do all 19 hours of The Ring Cycle because he was a Jew-hater, that's fine with me, but you are not a person of the world."

"Here's how I look at art, I'll show you." Saltz thrusts his hips forward and leans his head back as far as physically possible. "I stand like this, because I once saw Jasper Johns stand like this in a gallery, and I thought, 'That's the way to stand when you're looking at art.' My wife says to me, 'Why are you standing that way,' and I always go, 'What way?'"

"I know when I'm in a gallery or museum with artists because this is how they look at it." Saltz rushes toward the podium, feeling and banging and inspecting all sides, face an inch from its surface. "You're trying to see what it's made of, how they made it, right artists? In other words, you're stealing! More power to you."

"I believe in something I call radical vulnerability, which means a way of being naked in public. Telling your secrets without actually telling them. Because if you tell them *fart noise* they're no longer secrets. But they need to get on the outside of you for storage systems for the future. And retrievals. And better—reproduction. When you see my thing, you get an idea from it, incorporate part of it, and you reproduce it. Art is trying to reproduce itself."

"We all have second selves. My second self is this wild character on Instagram who I love watching. It takes me three seconds to find these images, between paragraphs. I'm writing hysterically, I get a little too much tension—and I might just have a thought, like 'beheadings, medieval,' and I hit images. One image leads me to another and I see a great image, I put it on with a ridiculous caption because I'm nervous, and next thing I know I'm in the Land of Like. And so happy. And it lasts five or seven minutes and then there's so many other pictures that nobody ever sees it again. And it's like your genius is gone, and I love that… But art it is not, it is what ever it is."

For more sass and wisdom, you can follow Jerry Saltz on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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