Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night - Hardcover

Saltz, Jerry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059308649X ISBN 13: 9780593086490

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent times

Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early champion of forgotten and overlooked women artists, he has also celebrated the pioneering work of African American, LGBTQ+, and other long-marginalized creators. Sotheby's Institute of Art has called him, simply, “the art critic.” 
 
Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points—from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today—Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture. Art Is Life offers Saltz’s eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker, David Wojnarowicz, Hilma af Klint, and Jasper Johns; provocateurs like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Marina Abramović; and visionaries like Jackson Pollock, Bill Traylor, and Willem de Kooning. Saltz celebrates landmarks like the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, writes searchingly about disturbing moments such as the Ankara gallery assassination, and offers surprising takes on figures from Thomas Kinkade to Kim Kardashian. And he shares stories of his own haunted childhood, his time as a “failed artist,” and his epiphanies upon beholding work by Botticelli, Delacroix, and the cave painters of Niaux. 
 
With his signature blend of candor and conviction, Jerry Saltz argues in Art Is Life for the importance of the fearless artist—reminding us that art is a kind of channeled voice of human experience, a necessary window onto our times. The result is an openhearted and irresistibly readable appraisal by one of our most important cultural observers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture, and the author of the New York Times bestseller How to Be an Artist. In 2018 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. A frequent guest lecturer at major universities and museums, he has spoken at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many other venues, and has taught at Columbia University, Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere.

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My Life as a Failed Artist


It pains me to say it, but I am a failed artist. "Pains me" because nothing in my life has given me the boundless psychic bliss of making art for hours at a stretch, as I did every day in my twenties and thirties-always thinking about it, looking for a voice to fit my own time, imagining scenarios of success and failure, feeling my imagined world and the external one merging in things that I was actually making.

Now I live on the other side of the critical screen, and all that language beyond words-all that doctor-shamanism of color, structure, and the mysteries of beauty-is gone. With time, I've come to consider myself fully and purely a critic, working through the same problems of expression from the other side. Yet I miss making art-miss it terribly. I've never really talked about my work to anyone. In my writing, I have occasionally mentioned the bygone years when I was an artist, usually laughingly. When I think of that time, I feel stabs of regret. But once I quit, I quit. I never made art again.

Of course, I often think that everyone who isn't making art is a failed artist, even those who never tried. I did try. More than try. I was an artist. At times, I even thought I was a great one.

I wasn't totally deluded. But I was a lazy smart aleck who felt sorry for myself, resented anyone with money, and felt the world owed me a living. For a few years, I attended classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, although I didn't always pay tuition and got no degree. But I did meet artists there, and I learned that staying up late with one another is how artists learn everything-developing new languages, communing, trading ideas.

In 1973, I was twenty-two, full of myself, and frustrated that I wasn't already recognized for my work. I walked into my roommate Barry Holden's room in our apartment, three hundred feet from Wrigley Field, and said, "Let's start an artist-run gallery. The two of us and our friends." He said okay-and we did it. For lack of a better name, we called it N.A.M.E.

It was great! People took notice; articles were written. I was interviewed by Peter Schjeldahl, the bigwig New York art critic. I met hundreds of artists and felt part of a huge community. I lived across the street from the gallery, in a huge sixth-floor unheated cold-water walk-up loft for which I paid $150 a month. The place had previously been a storage facility for Jerry Lewis's muscular dystrophy foundation, and my furniture was mostly what had been abandoned there: a wooden bench for a couch, a huge drafting table in the center of the space, a hot plate, buckets on the floor to catch the leaks from the ceiling, a pail to fill for pouring down the toilet to make it work, and a mattress on the floor. I was an artist.

By 1978, I'd had two solo shows at N.A.M.E. Both shows were part of a gigantic project I had begun the day before Good Friday in 1975. I was illustrating the entirety of Dante's Divine Comedy, starting with Inferno. Both exhibitions sold out. Museums bought my work. I was reviewed favorably in Artforum and the Chicago papers. My work was shown by the great Rhona Hoffman in Chicago and at the proto-Barbara Gladstone gallery in New York. I was delirious. Mice were still crawling on me at night; I was still showering at other people's houses. I didn't care. I had everything I needed. I even got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, for the huge sum of $3,000-which, along with the help of an artist girlfriend, enabled me to move to New York.

But then I looked back, into the abyss of self-doubt. I erupted with fear, self-loathing, dark thoughts about how bad my work was, how pointless, unoriginal, ridiculous. "You don't know how to draw," I told myself. "You never went to school. Your work has nothing to do with anything. Your art is irrelevant. You don't know art history. You can't paint. You only draw and work small because you're too afraid to paint and work big. You aren't a good schmoozer. You're too poor. You don't have enough time to make your work. You're a fake. You're not a real artist."

Every artist does battle, every day, with doubts like these. I lost the battle. It doomed me. But it also made me the critic I am today.


I still wonder, Was it my upbringing that sealed my fate? Art certainly wasnÕt in my life in the Chicago suburb where I grew up, unless you count the cheesy reproductions of French-ish Impressionists in our rec room.

When I began as an artist, my main spiritual home wasn't the Art Institute-even though I spent hours there, spellbound. It was Chicago's Field Museum of natural history. I loved that the work there wasn't freighted with art history; I felt freer fantasizing about it. More important, I loved that the ancient artwork at the Field Museum was for more than just looking at. It was meant to cast spells, to heal, to protect villages from invaders, to prevent or foster pregnancy, to guide one through the afterlife. I was devoted to art from the Northwest Coast, the Plains, the Southwest, and South and Central America. My favorite schools of abstract art were Navajo sand painting, Oceanic art, and the newly revealed work of Swedish visionary Hilma af Klint. All this work felt driven by innate spiritualism and inner necessity, a far cry from the abstraction coming out of New York.

What did the contemporary art world look like to me then? There were plenty of artists whose work I loved: Nancy Graves's sculptures of camels, Eva Hesse's gnarly materials in space, Lynda Benglis's giant poured-paint blobs coming off the gallery wall, Jennifer Bartlett's process dot paintings. And the work of my friends. At the time, I imagined that our nonrepresentational, process- or performance-based, and conceptual art would save Chicago from a group of artists I now love: the figurative surrealists-Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, Christina Ramberg, Gladys Nilsson, and Jeff Koons's teacher Ed Paschke-who became known as Chicago Imagists.

But art history was more important to me. I adored the Byzantine, the medieval, early Sienese painting, Native American art, Tibetan mandalas, Japanese prints, all of the Baroque, everything from the Northern and Southern Renaissance. I especially loved the cryptic illustrations, charts, and diagrams dealing with magic, mysticism, and visual mnemonic systems made by medieval and Renaissance-era alchemist-metaphysician-philosopher-artists most people have never heard of: Robert Fludd, Athanasius Kircher, Giordano Bruno, Ramon Llull, Giulio Camillo. By the time I was twenty-one, I was making hard-edged geometric drawings and paintings based on the I Ching, which looked a lot like Southwest Native American art and pre-Columbian Peruvian feather art. I thought, or hoped, they could tell the future.

Another regional strain coursed through me, too: Chicago's powerful connection to self-taught and outsider artists. I saw and loved the great outsider Lee Godie selling her drawings on the steps of the Art Institute; I admired the work of the self-taught Joseph Yoakum, who was promoted by many of the Chicago Imagists. The work of two outsider masters was discovered and embraced by Chicago in the 1970s: Mart’n Ram’rez in 1973 and Henry Darger in 1977. I was a guard at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art during its show of Adolf Wšlfli. I even worked at the New York gallery of Phyllis Kind, the Chicago dealer who showed many of these Imagists and outsiders. I wanted to be an outsider worm in the bowels of the insider hyena.


I began my inferno project just before dawn on the Thursday before Easter 1975, because Maundy Thursday is when DanteÕs story begins in the poem-lost in Òthe dark wood of error,Ó having strayed from the Òtrue way.Ó I planned to finish on Easter, the same day Dante...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059308649X
• ISBN 13: 9780593086490
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland