Hello, I'm Josh Baer and welcome to the Baer Facts podcast. In today's episode, I sit down with an old friend of mine, Jerry Saltz. Jerry's a Pulitzer Prize winning author and the art critic for New York Magazine, who came up with me in the art world of New York in the 1980s. Art critics and art advisors often come at the art world from different perspectives. And, in our conversation, we get into it a bit with each other over our differing views on the value of art and the art market.
But first... We'll go back to Jerry's beginnings in New York and Chicago as a struggling artist. Well Jerry, tell us about being an artist.
I started as an artist in 19, doesn't matter, but the late 70s, early 80s, and demons spoke to me. And they said to me what they say to everybody. You're no good. You don't know what you're doing. You have a bad neck. You never went to school. And I didn't go to school. I have no degrees. I just was an asshole. And so don't... Listen to the demons, because you're listening to somebody right now who did. Before I did that, I was an artist, like I say.
I made work, I sold the work, I showed it at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. I got the National Endowment for the Arts grant, 2, 500, moved to New York, and came here and stopped working. And then... I self exiled. I had a kind of walking nervous breakdown where I walked around the art world and I hated everyone, absolutely. I was filled with rage. Why doesn't this one owe me a living? How come I can't show there? Why can't I do this? Complaining, not working.
And it turns out that envy is a knife you hold to your own throat. And I self exiled and became a long distance truck driver. It sounds cool. I was alone all the time. I would drive from New York to Florida, New York to Texas, New York to California. My CB handle was The Jewish Cowboy. I used to get on the CB and go, Hello, shalom, partner. Can anybody here talk about the early work of Carl Andre or whatever? And no one ever spoke to me. And on these trips, I learned fuck nothing.
Absolutely nothing. Until finally, after ten years of this, I decided that nothing And this earth could make me more unhappy than my life. And I thought, well, what could I do? And I ruled out being a curator because I didn't have interesting glasses or clothes or ideas. I wanted to be an art dealer. But I forgot I had no money, and so I thought, oh, I'll be an art critic.
And then I had to teach myself to write, and I started doing that, and I started writing, and then ended up getting the job at The Voice, and the rest is what happened.
In today's episode of the Bare Facts Podcast, Josh and Jerry debate the value of art, how the relationship between art critics and the market has changed over the course of their careers, and how the art world became the way it is today. But first, we'll hear about a fateful meeting between Josh and Jerry almost 30 years ago.
Jerry, do you remember a little conversation we had in Soho in 1994, you and I?
No. What? Well, we sat there at a famous restaurant called Jerry's, and I said to you, Jerry Salts, I have this idea. Go on. For something to publish called, did I have a name for it? I
don't remember, but
maybe. So now that you remember, what was it that I wanted you to do?
You wanted me to write up all the sort of news, events, things, activities into a newsletter, and what did I say? You
said, that's a dumb idea, you should do it yourself.
Almost right.
Almost right, you said it was a great idea, but you can do it yourself,
Josh. Yeah, and I was right, and I knew I was right then, because you had the passion to do it. Your syntax is some of the strangest syntax I've ever seen, and I always recognize it. So, I've now learned to love it, too.
It's a matter of, when I would do more often before I had a big team, like, typos, I would say, well, that's a way to identify plagiarist. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. That if they did the same misspelling as I did, it meant they just took it from me. Mm hmm. So... Well, there you are. But you, what could have been, you and I doing The Bare Facts, 1994, it could have been called The Salts Facts.
Well, it kept you young and in the game and absolutely on some edge that I think that critics lose eventually. No matter what I had to do, um, you stay up, you, I don't know many, many of the artists that you'll announce that they've gone to this gallery or that gallery. They're completely unfamiliar to
me. I think an important point to make that is in general is identifying the difference between art criticism and art journalism. And I think at that point you were really leaning into and have continued. to, even though it's a bit of a hybrid what you do, of criticism, can you talk about the state of art criticism now and what it means to you? Well,
back then, and I guess now, I really wanted it to be something that people could understand. That, as an art critic, I wanted to be able to write what I thought. In a language that people could understand and put out opinion.
Now at the time, especially at that time, you had all this art criticism of these books and magazines surrounding me, which are old art forums and whatnot, that all said, The late commodified object of post capitalist, structuralist, dialectic between the haptic and the vatic, and the, and it just kept going, and I learned to write that way. And then eventually I did learn to write.
I would say reading, having read Baudrillard, having read Lacan, Bataille, great writers. Art critics didn't need to then take on that, um, that structure to try to show that they were intelligent.
Yeah, and I also think it made them dumb. I think that it made them dumb to really what was happening, dumb to what the work was about. And the only reason I think I'm still writing at 72. which is a miracle to me, is that I just, I'm still saying what I, I see something and I say what I see. Is that easy
to do?
Um, I try to make it sound super easy, but it isn't not easy. It's not easy at all. Every sentence I kind of sweat for, I work for. Um. I have a thing where I have to write early in the morning, because if I don't, then I won't write at all. So I try to get up, and I'll scroll on this phone for about an hour or so. I don't know what I'm going to post, usually, in the morning. And then I'll see two or three things. I'll take pictures of them on my phone, write three little thumb essays, and...
Post them and then I try to get to work, and when I write now, I try to write really hard. Almost the whole day
after the break, Josh and Jerry talk about the value of art and debate. The question is good, the enemy of great. Or is great the enemy of everything else? Don't transact without the Bear Faxed. Subscribe to the Bear Faxed newsletter to receive the key developments in the art world and op eds from Josh Bear in your inbox each Thursday. Plus special auction editions direct from the sale room. The only report on who bought what and who tried to but didn't get it. Head to TheBearFax.
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Now, let's go from our OG status a little bit to like, you and I have such different views of the art world, which is I think what makes it interesting that we don't have monolithic thoughts. I remember one time you said to me, and I don't remember the context, I said, I'm not interested in 50, 000 sort of mid level, mediocre, probably the word I used, artists. And you said, well, I am. Can
you explain why? Well, let's see. I'm not sure if that's the exact right quote, but I, a couple of things. I think that. 85% of what you will see will be mediocre. But the interesting thing, Josh, is that you're 85% in minor, one thing, uh, 85%, 85%. Everybody has a different thing. So this 15% of overlap becomes an extremely interesting
15% of excellence.
The 15% of what isn't mediocre. Right. And our job is to kind of sort through it. The point I think I might have been trying to get to was that You and yours tend to focus on, a little less lately, but had focused on the top, like, 12 artists, over and over, or the top 22, and I think that that's just a terrible disservice. Not that those 22 artists aren't any good. I'm sure they're okay. Some are really mediocre, in my opinion, but a lot of the rest are probably amazing and better. Well, I
guess where we, uh, come apart in some ways and we're actually much closer in other ways than you realize is out of the 4 million artists in America, there's a lot of noise there. Right. And then I think, well, there were 60, 000 artists who lived during the Renaissance. I can probably name one, maybe two. You probably got. Six or eight. It's hard to imagine that many what I would call great artists and me personally.
I'm looking for great work And I think you're coming at it from a different vantage
point. Yeah, again I think the great is the enemy of everything else I truly do the great may be great, but then the maybe not so great is really great in another way, meaning that what they're doing might be equally important somehow. Maybe we'll forget them. Maybe we won't even know who Lawrence Weiner is in 10, 15, 20 years. It doesn't matter. It's what is the conversation now.
Well, let me ask you as an art advisor, which is my other hat, first of all, what you think of art advisors and their role. And then I'll come back to you with how that relates to what you just said.
I think that art advising is really important. Honestly, every single person in the art world has a job. My job's no more important than your job is no more important than anybody's job. And art advisors do. A job. They try to tell people what to buy. All art advisors will claim that I'm trying to get my clients to buy their own thing. But the truth is, everybody is pretty much buying pretty much the same 22 artists. Fine with me. That's your job. Keep doing it.
If you want to broaden it out to 50, maybe you've gotten 50 artists. That's fine.
I mean, for me, 50 artists, or 100 or whatever, are sort of like around the world, the ones that have that sort of ability to have the longevity. It's a different standard when you're looking at artists under 30, that you can't use the same standard for, um,
history. Well, again, I'm not talking about age. What I'm thinking about is, I'm always interested when I go into artists homes, for example, what they collect. And they collect their friends, things they found on the street, things that were given to them, things that are great, and things that are really not great at all that become
great. They're doing things that relate, many of them, to how they think about their own work rather than thinking about it as either a collector or an accumulator of objects.
I would say that's true, but I'm also interested in any person that collects things, that that's how they collect.
I don't collect things, so. Well, neither do I. No,
maybe, maybe books. As I get older, the truth is I think people should collect whatever the hell they want to collect. It's just the problem for me is 99% of the people collect the same, you know, 1% of all the artists.
There's more and more truth to that in terms of, and then they shift to the same five new ones and then they move to the same. And that's
fine. That's what people want to do.
That's great. But I will say, and I do say to my clients, when you're spending your own money and a lot of money sometimes, good is the enemy of great. Hey,
didn't I just say that?
I think you said great is the enemy of good. Oh, well, all I know is We had different enemies on that. It's like things that are really good can get in the way of being too low a standard as an art advisor rather than as an art critic. We're all in the same field, but we're in different sidelines.
Again, I just think people should buy what they like, but most people get art advisors because they're not sure what they should like. So, your job, I guess, is to tell them what they should like, but that seems to me a contradiction in terms. I
do well with two kinds of clients that I advise. One is, people have been collecting for 40 years, and I'm not telling them what to like. I'm explaining the difference between this glass of water with 8. 1 ounces and this other glass of water that's from a different place with 8. 05 ounces and making distinctions that are really pretty. elitist or more profound. And I'm pretty good with people who know they don't know anything.
And getting them, I will say, my job is to get you things you love, but that I think have historical value and you're not getting screwed by the market. Well,
it works on me because it's like, Oh, I have to get what he's telling me to. But I think what you're saying is value is always seeking value. And I find a problem with that. Honestly, I think that value can be almost
anything. But there's different values in art because in fact art has in traditional ways no value. Absolutely. So it's an act of faith and I certainly don't confuse commercial success and value as being, um, correlating one to one with artistic value.
I don't know that we're this far apart on anything that... In, in one way, it's your job, and I
know And your job is the,
is what you do. And you do it, and you get to go all over the place, and then I get to be jealous, and I'm amazed at where you get to go. But when we're in the
same place, I can afford to go to Basel, it's, and your budget doesn't let you do that. Whatever. But let's say we're at Freeze New York. That's fine. How do you
experience it? I love going to the big openings of about two or three big fairs. I go, I look at everybody, I'm amazed at how beautiful everybody is, just what they're wearing. And then I like this, just look. And then I want to look at art, but I can't. I just find it. It's absolutely impossible to see art. So what I do after about four hours is stop looking at the art and then just look at people and talk to people and sit down and chat.
And I've also think that many people in the art world have only been to art fairs on the first day. I actually think that most of us go only on the cool day.
It's an important distinction when we try to think about how do we expand our audience. And I often said, there's a guy on day four at Art Basel Miami Beach, bought a ticket for 40 bucks, who's walking in. He might buy a drawing for 15, 000. That's an interesting target.
I'm good with that. I want all of that. I think that the art fairs are now like American politics. It's a huge system that no one likes, that no one thinks works, and no one knows how to fix it. If a gallery said, I'm not gonna be in this thing anymore, their artists immediately would be at home like, well, Matthew Marks says he's not gonna be in the art fairs anymore. I'm gonna call up Larry Gagosian and I'm gonna show with him.
So, in a way... I think that I don't blame the art dealers, and I really don't blame anybody. It's a system we cannot fix. Everyone, and I predicted this, everyone at the beginning of the pandemic said, That's it. Art fairs are over. And I said to everybody, No way they're over. In fact, they're going to come back even stronger. And that's what's happened, more or less.
Well, the good part of that is people seeing art in person versus art on their phone or their computer, but they're busy schmoozing people at the same time. Seeing
art on your phone and computer is one category I accept, and I'm not sure they're actually seeing art. I do think that they are touching antenna, schmoozing, uh, doing deals. I think that's all great. It has to happen, unfortunately, in order for me to exist.
But one of the things that, and even in this, we have a little different view, is you want the artist to succeed and make a living. Uh huh. And a lot of our journalists or our critics seem to be against the market and against money. That's not where you're coming from.
No, no, no, no. I just accept money as a necessary. Absolutely. I want all artists to succeed. The good, the bad, and the very bad. That's the only time we can see who you really are. Now, the problem is that most art is not very good. I accept that. That's a true statement. However, That's okay, too, and I'm interested in seeing it all.
For me, it's like, well, if I bat 170, I should still make a 3 million major league. You know, contract, and that's not the way the world works. Well,
the way the world works doesn't really work for everybody. It works for a tiny, tiny, tiny percent at the top, and I'm really excited for the people it works for. But for everybody else, it can work too. It just means that I don't make as much money. It means that I don't do as much, but I'm having a ball. I have so much fun on my idiot phone and going to my, I see 120, well, I used to see 125 shows a week. I still see 25 to 30 shows a week in about a hundred galleries.
These are galleries you would never. Go to, and nor should you ever go to, and it's very exciting for me to be seeing what's out there. The shit I post, you may just look at it and go, God, why? How come he couldn't give, even like that? Well, at the moment, I felt that the work was convincing, and that it made a case for itself. It doesn't mean I love the work, but it just means the work was in play for me. And I'm interested in that.
I think it's great because it's the exact opposite of how I go about it. And I think the art world is a bit prudish and conservative. And we have one way of doing things. And I need to and try to accept that while I believe in my way for me, we don't have to force that onto everybody. But the
problem is, your way is the way. I
am a gatekeeper.
You are a gatekeeper. I gave up the keys. I laid the keys at the gate and said to everybody, These are yours. Look at my stupid Instagram. It opens up the doors. And instead of the one speaking to the many, I was able to get the many to speak to one another. And to me, that forum has been an incredible teaching device for me and for other people.
Join us after the break as Jerry gets candid about his thoughts on auction houses. and how the power of art critics has changed over his career. Don't transact without The Bare Faxed. Consider bundling your newsletter subscription with access to our auction database, the only platform that lets you know who bought what, and who tried to, but didn't get it. With over 12, 000 data points going back to 1994. Head to thebarefaxed. com to learn more.
I was looking for this the other day, and I actually couldn't find it, but now I see it, um, your first book. Oh, God. And I spent the time, and this book, which I haven't looked at in 30 years, it's called Beyond Boundaries. It was... So ugly.
There we go. Oh,
God. And, what's, let's see, 1986. Six. Six. And... It's kind of the opposite. You started sort of like, where I am like, here's Jeff Koons, all the,
the
hot young artists of the 80s, Barbara Kruger, famous, who's this Meyer Weisman guy? Gone. And it was like, but that's where you entered was sort of in a standard way, wouldn't you say?
Absolutely. That's probably about 55 artists, something like that. And I was trying to pick 55 artists at that moment, and I probably did an okay job. And so what? It's the last time you looked at the book. Oh God, I tried to destroy as many cop, I threw up boxes. Please don't even, I'll buy that from you. Here's a hundred dollars, you know. Um, so,
I don't know. But it's, we all tend to start from the traditional vantage point. Yeah. And this was a conscious decision of how you interact with art dealers, artists, art fairs, auction houses. I mean, what do you think of the auction houses then? Well,
I think they're a pox on everybody's house and they agree. They too hate auctions, but they are art lovers. The people that work in auctions houses are great people. They love art as much as you and I do. But what they're doing is setting prices at obscene, ridiculous, horrifying levels on the one hand, and two, they say everything is great. How could I be the only one? that looked at that, uh, fake, that fishy da Vinci, and said, but this thing is fake. It's an absolute fake.
And everybody said, why? And I said, well, first of all, the surface is dead. Second of all, and I went into this whole thing about the provenance, tried to explain that Leonardo never painted anybody looking straight on like that, ever. Blah, blah, blah. The point being that I was right, and that slowly that painting is already being dismissed. Auction houses,
they just won't go away. I think we make a mistake. What do they do? What do they do? Well, they're marketplace only. I think we tend to put all the ethical, moral issues of the art world about flipping young artists, or what's quality and what's not, and what's in vogue onto them. They're marketplace. And... We should look within ourselves more than just saying, well, why are these guys who are just there to sell something from rich person A in Korea to rich person B in Paris?
They're just a conduit for that. So I think we put too much ethical and moral issues onto them. And I will say the ones that are really best at it actually do love art.
Auction house people love art. They're no more or less responsible for the fucking mess that this is. But the fucking mess that this is has done something incredible. It moved on underrepresented artists and Artists of color, queer, disabled artists, way before the galleries, which is interesting. They moved in. The market, art advisors, museums, galleries have been catching up. Well, let
me phrase it a different way. Sixty years ago, 70, 50. The person who was leading those movements was the art critic. What counted was Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, either to the history of art and also to the art market. That doesn't exist anymore. No,
I absolutely agree. And I think. It's great to have the art critic not under that kind of pressure. And people like Clement Greenberg, he was a big bully. Had I been around then, I would have either been yelling at him or been yelled at by him.
I would say that speaking for your wife, Roberta Smith, who's been writing at the New York Times for, gosh, 40 years or so. Mm hmm. When she would review a show, it was directly related to your sales. Mm hmm. And if you made a sale and she wrote about your show, it was a bad review, you'd get a phone call saying, You know what? It changed my mind. Wow. In the same way the theater critic in the New York Times would single handedly Be one person deciding what made it on Broadway.
Can't be a pleasant experience for the critic unless they're just driven by power.
Well, I would disagree. I think it can't be a pleasant experience for the critic. Unless they're driven, period. Roberta is simply driven.
It's funny because I want the critic and the curator to be ahead of the collector and the dealer in establishing, um, what to look at. But that's gone. Yeah, I
think all of that's gone and you have to let it go, Josh.
Has the community of, um, social media changed that?
Social media has been part of that change. Everything's part of the change. The art world that we lived in once upon a time is gone. You are an amazing relic that is still hanging on, and so am I. Thank God. So where are
we going to be 30 years from now? Aside from 6 feet under, maybe.
We'll hear Jerry's predictions for the future of the art world and his advice for those just getting their start after the break. Don't transact without the bare faxed. Consider bundling your subscription with our Art Advisory Membership Program, offering on demand access to our diverse team of international specialists for a low annual fee. Valued by both collectors new to the market, And experienced players like galleries and even other advisors head to the fairfax.com to learn more.
What's happening is that we lived to see the collapse of the ideology of modernism. Modernism produced a lot of great art, but it's ideology that it moved in a linear fashion where one thing proceeded and progressed from the other. Going to
MoMA, they used to
tell that story. And that will be seen, if it is not seen already, as completely psychotic, completely crazy. This was followed by an even more psychotic movement that was sort of anti modernism, but called itself post modernism. The point is that right now, art is just coming from everywhere, by everybody, all at the same time, from every place, about anything. Right now, everything is in play. Right now, criticism is temporarily suspended.
Not from me, not from Roberta, but by and large, criticism doesn't exist.
There may be ten art critics who can pay their rent in America. Right,
and I would say that, whatever, a small fraction of them only can write opinion. The point is that opinion isn't the coin of the realm anymore. Right now, it's like, holding this artist up, saying how they compare to that one, how do they relate to this one, how is this all part of something building? And People worry constantly. Oh my God, there's so much mediocrity getting through. Of course there's mediocrity getting through. There's always mediocrity getting through.
Sean Scully, who I'm sure a lot of you people are listening to and you love him, he's mediocre. But he sells for a couple of million dollars, he's in all the art fairs, and that's great. And he's mediocre, so other people can be mediocre, and I'm old. I can tell you that it all gets washed out. The mediocrity falls away. And you end up with something kind of interesting in there. Don't you
then wind up with like the canons of art of you going to the Art Institute of Chicago and you have this room of Cezanne's and the room of Van Gogh, and by the way, it's great.
It is great. I hope we don't have to throw those out. And we do end up with a new canon, but the canon's going to be new. And it is not going to look anything like the old canon. In fact, I think you could re hang 80% of the old canon. You could take out Hans Hoffman from the, like, 1956. You just take out 25, Put in, say, a woman. A black woman, an Ecuadorian woman, an Estonian woman, an Ethiopian woman, I do not care.
The point is, if the work is from around the same time, it will not ruin the story of modernism. On the contrary, it will improve it. The story of art has just been told by winners. It's a complete lie, this canon. Yes, there are great things in it. Yes. Yes. But. It's time now.
I've just come back for my second trip this year to Asia, going again next month. One of the things that I've learned is that it's important to understand how. You're a Western centric, all these ideas really are. Yeah. And that our view that all this canon is the only canon is debatable. Have you spent time in other cultures in South America and Asia?
Only in my mind, and I, I just fantasize amazing answers to it, but I will never know. But I am open to it, and I watch it, and I listen, and I'm just waiting. What would
your advice be to people just starting out in the art world?
First of all, be afraid, be very afraid. You're going to be embarrassed no matter what you do, but you have to start doing it. So, as far as what to do, I would always tell people, show, get to work. Those two things, by showing up, it means staying up late as often as possible with other people like yourself and showing up at galleries, museums, art fairs, exhibitions, go to Of course you don't know anybody, but nobody really knows anybody anyway.
So, the minute you start talking to me, I'll start talking to you. Or if you start talking to Josh, Josh will start talking to him. Um, you have to get to work. If you're an artist, finish the damn thing. For God's sake, finish it. So that's really what I would tell people. You've just got to get out there, man, and show up. That's who things happen
to. But it needs the second part of like, well, there's 600 galleries, so I can't go everywhere. You go to a hundred. Yeah. It's like, I go to like 10. Right. So it's a little bit deeper. It's like, how do I get my information? Right. How do I decide which places?
I would pick my information kind of like in a general way, I would go to me. I would go to Roberta. I guess I would go to Barefax. I guess I would go to. Artnet, and then for your communist people, go to hyperallergic, because they're going to complain about all of us anyway, and that's all part of it. That's great. And then also go on your own. So I'm not sure where to get it, but be selective and be general, and what else do people want to know? Just keep showing up, I guess.
We learned by hanging out in Magoo's, in Mud Club, in Artist Space. I
was never in Mud Club, but I, yes. But
that kind of, Max's, you know, one university place. Yeah, I was never there. We, we had a sign on the door, don't let him in. I don't know. I learned in those places.
Yeah, you did. You were already in, you, you were. I'm a Nepo baby. You're a Nepo baby, and you're a great Nepo baby.
Was there one scene in particular where you used to hang out in back in the day?
There was, there was, uh, a woman named Clarissa Delrimple who has had a stroke and is, uh, I'm 72 so she'd be 80 now, but in my mind she's forever young, and in the late 80s and all through the 90s, she gave like three dinners a week. Four dinners a week. It was insane. She was poor. She lived on Worcester and, uh, Houston on the 8th floor and we would all walk upstairs and there'd be 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 people there.
And you would hang out and I would hang out with everybody from Jasper Johns and, and Bryce Martin and Helen Martin and, and, and those people to Young artists like Chris Ofili, or Nick Sirota, or Matthew Sladover, or the kids from Freeze, or whoever. And it was there that I fell into a scene. And I was really, really lucky. And I wasn't welcome, but I got to go probably because of Roberta. I just held on by the skin of my teeth and learned to hone my own craft there.
And I'm sure there are many, many art worlds. And right now, you, you, you go to different salons. That was mine. It was a cool one. But so is yours. So is yours. And I hope that people are still doing that. But it really changed me. I was attacked there. I learned there. A lot happened there. I didn't get to sleep with anybody, but I had a great time.
We'd like to give a big thank you to Jerry Saltz for joining us for this episode, and to say that we look forward to having you on the podcast again sometime soon. Thank you for listening to the Bare Facts Podcast, brought to you by the leading news source for the art world since 1994. Our host is Josh Baer. Our executive producer is Luyang Jiang. I'm Will Griffith, our assistant editor. Our content advisor is Bo Liang Shin, and our editing team is Mona Productions.
Subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts, and check back soon for future episodes as we unpack the inner workings of the global art industry through exclusive, candid interviews with key players in the business as they offer their perspectives on art and the market in the U. S., Asia, Europe, and beyond.