18 Quotes & Sayings By Jerry Saltz

Jerry Saltz is a contributing editor of New York Magazine and the author of several books, including "New York: The Metropolitan Life," "The Power Of Pop," and "Laughing Matters: A Cultural History of American Comedy." He has written for many other publications and television programs, and has appeared on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," "The Today Show," and NPR. He lives in New York City.

1
Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines. Jerry Saltz
2
All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy. Jerry Saltz
3
I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.' Jerry Saltz
4
Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art. Jerry Saltz
5
New Yorkers only cross water for visual culture if the water is an ocean. The East River throws us for a huge loop. If we started going to Queens and the Bronx for visual culture, many of our rent, space, and crowding problems would be over indefinitely. Jerry Saltz
6
Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors. Jerry Saltz
7
'The Panorama' is also the last place anywhere in New York where the World Trade Center still stands, whole, as it stood in the early morning of September 11. I can also see the corner where I saw the first tower fall and howled out loud. Seeing the buildings again here is uplifting, healing. Jerry Saltz
8
Artists working for other artists is all about knowing, learning, unlearning, initiating long-term artistic dialogues, making connections, creating covens, and getting temporary shelter from the storm. Jerry Saltz
9
The secret of food lies in memory - of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is. Jerry Saltz
10
First let me report that the art in the Barnes Collection has never looked better. My trips to the old Barnes were always amazing, but except on the sunniest days, you could barely see the art. The building always felt pushed beyond its capacity. Jerry Saltz
11
Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power. Jerry Saltz
12
When the purse strings tighten up at museums, the institutions usually cut back and cancel shows. That's exactly the wrong reaction. In fact, now is a good time for them to loosen up - a chance to breathe and experiment a little - and go for the juicy solution lurking in their own basements. Jerry Saltz
13
Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness. Jerry Saltz
14
Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world. Jerry Saltz
15
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. Jerry Saltz
16
A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low. Jerry Saltz
17
It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction. Jerry Saltz