Jerry Saltz Has Visions

At any given moment, Jerry Saltz is likely on deadline. He’s probably on one right now. If you close your eyes, you might be able to hear him typing feverishly at his post, with Bob Dylan playing in the background, as he untangles his thoughts in the glow of his screen.

When I met Saltz at his regular neighborhood coffee shop on a Friday afternoon in June, he was wearing his usual outfit: navy pants, a navy oxford shirt, and sneakers. Saltz is a man of habit and diligence—he never misses a deadline and rarely goes out to dinner. His daily routine looks like this: wake up, write, coffee, write, scribble, read, rewrite, art, rewrite again. It’s clear that Saltz possesses an unwavering commitment to his craft, but that’s what it takes to win a Pulitzer Prize, publish five books, receive three honorary doctorates, and sustain a twenty-year stint in his current position, among other achievements. It should be noted that before his career as an art critic began, Jerry Saltz was a long-distance truck driver. He didn’t begin writing professionally until he was forty.

Growing up outside Chicago, Saltz had no inkling of his fate. He has one distinct memory of being moved by art as a child, but his trajectory took time. Saltz moved to New York as an artist at twenty-seven. It would be another decade before he secured his first writing gig at Arts Magazine and another five before he began writing his column, “Seeing Out Loud,” at The Village Voice. Saltz’s story is the most inspiring kind: a winding path, willingness to become inspired, a creative spirit, and enough eagerness to try to be great eventually led him to his destiny. Yet, even as a master seer, Saltz couldn’t have predicted he would become the most widely read art critic in the world. Or maybe, in some way, he did.

Megan O’Sullivan: Let’s start at the beginning. Do you have a memory of the first time you saw a work of art that made an impression on you?

Jerry Saltz: Yes, a very big one.

MO: What was it?

JS: When I was ten, my mother drove us in from the suburbs to the Art Institute of Chicago — and left me there alone. I hated the Art Institute. I always just wanted to play baseball and hang out with my friends. I was wandering around and around until I came across two paintings on a wall. I got close and I was looking left and right. And left and right. One was a man in a prison cell with two guys talking to him. In the other one, the prisoner’s head poked through the prison cell. A swordsman had been there and chopped off his head and there was blood flowing everywhere. His head was being carried off in the background by somebody. It was a wild scene. I remember looking back and forth and thinking, this is telling me a story.

MO: Wow. Was that the beginning of your interest in art?

JS: In a way. I remember looking around the building, thinking, every single thing in this building is here to tell me something. What’s even more significant about this story is that my mother then committed suicide shortly thereafter. I was never told about the suicide. My brothers came home from Sunday school, and there were a bunch of hot cars in our driveway. I walked into my house, and all these people looked at me. I thought, what’s going on? I went upstairs and understood that my mother had passed. The next day, I went to school. My mother was never spoken of ever again for the rest of my life.

The point of the story is this: In the Met in New York, there’s a painting by Giovanni di Paolo, and that’s the artist whose paintings I saw that day at the Art Institute of Chicago. I saw another Giovanni painting in the Met many years later. The point is that the painting I saw in Chicago, which I later learned was Giovanni di Paolo’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, instantly became the best painting I’d ever seen when I saw it for the first time. Years passed once I made the connection. My first time seeing that work is very, very vivid to me. And it’s in me to this minute. That’s where I come from.

MO: I’m blown away. That must have shaped your entire life.

JS: Oh yes. Everything in me. Or not everything. But you’re right. How I see the world and understand the world comes from that unbelievable chance meeting of me and that painting. And then having it resurface years later.

MO: Did your interest in art come after that?

JS: Not yet. I graduated high school at the bottom of my class. I never did any homework. I never went to college. I filled out my SATs in a beautiful pattern. I loved the pattern, and I’m sure I got a 0. I have no degrees aside from my high school diploma. I made art. I came to New York as an artist, but I wasn’t yet writing.

MO: When did you move to New York?

JS: I was twenty-seven. I felt much too old to have come then. I thought I missed everything. I arrived in 1980 and thought I had missed those years when everybody had nothing to lose. I was always too afraid to move to New York from Chicago, and then I felt that I got here too late.

MO: I also came to New York at twenty-seven and felt the exact same way.

JS: Did you? And was it too late?

MO: Not at all. It turned out to be right on time for me. How did you finally start writing?

JS: Well, I came to New York as an artist, and then I quit making art. You know those demons that speak to you at 3:00 a.m.? Those critical voices?

MO: Oh yes. Too well.

JS: I listened to those, and I stopped making art. I never want this generation, ever, to listen to that voice. You’ve got to fight back the demons. That’s job number one. Because I’m seventy-three now, and I hear them every day. Still! They never change. They’re so boring. They’re so effective. Anyway, I stopped making art and became a long-distance truck driver, and exiled myself. Eventually, I started writing for The Village Voice. That wasn’t until I was around forty.

MO: Those voices can be all too convincing. But you kept going!

JS: They’re terrible! Don’t listen to the voices.

MO: How do you tune them out?

JS: I don’t! I just keep writing. What I’m interested in about your generation is—since there’s so little money in writing and so little to lose, and there’s very little fame—writers who are actually writing what they think. It seems like the most basic thing to do, but, as you know, writing is this beautiful, simple, awful thing. We all hate writing. Every writer hates it! But writing is how Megan and Jerry understand the world. It’s how we hear what we think. You often begin a piece thinking it’s one thing, and it’s something else. Criticism is not what it used to be, so I’m interested in more honest writing.

MO: I admire that commitment. After you see all those shows, how do you organize your thoughts and reactions to what you saw?

JS: Every time I go out, I see something that changes what I believe. Staying in touch with my own reactions is the challenge of being a critic. It’s always changing. If your tastes freeze, you should consider yourself in trouble or dead.

MO: So your taste is always changing?

JS: In some way. If you no longer like the art of your time—and we all go through that, where you think everything is shit—but that’s not good. Nostalgia is the enemy. I don’t think you’re really making political art if you’re always going back. The problem is that, at any given moment in time, in culture, 90 percent of what you see will be crap. You have to be able to do several things. You have to think, what is the 10 percent that I do like? What about the 90 percent that I don’t like? What’s making me like it? What’s making me not like it? And then we can argue with each other about our 10 percent. In my work, I look at what I understand and what I don’t, I admit to that, and I work it out in my own 1,200 words.

MO: What’s your process like when you’re working through those words?

JS: Well, first, you have to get very quiet inside. Don’t try to understand the work. No one asks, what does Mozart mean? You experience Mozart. Works of art are verbs. They are things that do things to you. And then your job as a critic is to start parsing all of that up. Art is the greatest operating system our species has ever devised to expose consciousness, the seen and unseen worlds. Art has never not been with us since the beginning. Our job is not to understand it; it’s to experience it.

MO: Who is the best art critic?

JS: My wife. She’s the chief art critic for The New York Times. She’s an infinitely better art critic than I am. I consider myself to be maybe the thirteenth best. She, in my opinion, is the best. She can go much deeper, much simpler, more formally. I blow out from an object; she goes in. Sometimes I lack the skills or the consciousness to go deep enough.

MO: So, would you say a good art critic is someone with the ability to go deep into the conscious?

JS: Yes. But also, a good critic mentions the artist’s name in the first paragraph. The critic gets to the fucking point. Don’t clear your throat, don’t give me the backstory as a front story to tell your news story. Describe and judge. That’s all art criticism is. And then, go into yourself, while keeping in mind that you aren’t the subject of the review. The work is the subject of the review, you big, narcissistic, egomanic baby! (Points to himself.)

MO: OK, these are really good pieces of advice. What else?

JS: Well, the next measure I use to decide if a piece of criticism is good or not is, did I finish reading the piece? If I didn’t, I blame you, the writer. Even though I’m a horrible reader. Every time I’m reading, I end up drifting off and daydreaming and getting ideas. Like you!

MO: I’m definitely guilty of that.

JS: I also believe in edits. One hundred percent. An editor has never made my work worse. An editor won me the Pulitzer Prize! That was thanks to them.

MO: We’re not giving editors nearly enough credit these days.

JS: I’m also going to show you one of my secrets.

MO: Please!

JS: (Pulls out several legal pads.) These are my notes. And I make pages and pages. I have like, a hundred of these around me. I can’t write without music playing because I’ve spent too many years writing alone in silence. I was losing my mind.

MO: What type of music do you play while writing?

JS: I can now listen to anything. Norwegian death metal—you name it. And while I’m writing, if I’m trying to think of the answer or I’m working through a thought, I’ll stop and listen to the music. If Bob Dylan sings a line and it resonates, I take it. I never hesitate to take anything I hear. Because it was meant for me at that moment.

MO: I’m going to try that next time I’m on a deadline.

JS: That’s another rule. Never miss a fucking deadline. I have never missed a deadline. I want that on my tombstone. Without a deadline, I wouldn’t write. It’s so awful. I’m so sorry that you now have to work on something to write from this interview. That’s terrible. I’ve even tried to train AI to write like me, but it just ends up repeating itself. It’s not forming an opinion. If you try to train AI to write, it will lack the ME-ness of whatever it is you’re saying.

MO: Well, at least you tried. I’m kind of surprised you tried to train AI to write for you!

JS: I would argue to all writers that we’re in the absolute infancy of AI. This is day one of its life. Don’t try to keep it at arm’s length! And don’t suddenly become an AI artist. Your generation is going to have to cope with this. But I think it can be a tremendous tool. You just have to make yourself irreplaceable.

MO: Those are some wise words that we probably all need to hear. OK, Jerry, I just have one last question for you.

JS: I’m ready.

MO: What does it mean to see?

JS: What does it mean to see? Seeing is our way of interacting, experiencing, and knowing ourselves and our world and our time. Seeing is a way to understand that everything exists in the present and that all art was once contemporary art. Each time you see a work of art and get quiet within yourself, and try to see how the artist embeds thought in material—that’s Roberta’s quote, “The artist’s job is to embed thought in material.”—when you can pick up on that, that’s the purpose of seeing, knowing the world, knowing yourself and being conscious. If you are blind, you will use another sense. I still have my sight; I’m losing my hearing, I will be deaf at some point, but I still have the sense that’s used for consciousness the most, and I’m very lucky for that.

MO: I think it’s cool that you closed your eyes as you thought of and said your answer.

JS: I didn’t even notice! But you’re right. That’s how I get quiet and see what I’m thinking. I close my eyes.