Jerry Saltz Will Spout Off About “Art Is Life”

There is arguably no one better at describing the art in life and the life in art than Pulitzer Prize winner Jerry Saltz, who’ll be at the Kent Community House on Saturday, November 12 for a discussion of his latest work, Art Is Life:,Icons & Iconoclasts, Visionaries & Vigilantes, & Flashes of Hope in the Night, sponsored by House of Books.

Saltz, author of How to Be an Artist, is senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture; author of the New York Times bestseller How to Be an Artist; and 2018 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. He’s lectured at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others, and taught at Columbia University, Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere, and holds three honorary doctorates.

It would be an impressive resume for anyone; it’s downright startling and heartening to realize that Saltz only began writing in his 40s. “When I was 41 & still just a long-distance truck-driver with no degrees — at a party someone asked me what I did,” he wrote on Twitter in October 2019. “I lied: “Art critic.” They said “Oh.” I realized, even though I’d never written a word in my life I could call myself anything I want, set aside the terror & DO IT.”

That he has. Saltz — who, with his wife, has been residing in Western Connecticut of late — is renowned for having his finger on the pulse point connecting the “art world” to the world-world. Sotheby’s has called him simply “the art critic.” In 2010, when Facebook was barely more than a rapidly growing pup, artist Jennifer Dalton based a work entitled "What Are We Not Shutting Up About?" on a statistical analysis of five months of interactions on his personal page, which she called “an amazing site of written dialogue and as a place where culture is being created on the spot.” The same could be said of his current unfettered musings on Instagram and Twitter, with over a half million followers on each.

In announcing the pending publication of Art Is Life to his nearly 94,000 Facebook friends last February, Saltz describes the work as “the long, weird story of how, in the last twenty years, a nonstop parade of artists, gallerists, curators, critics (hi!), and others have transformed the art world from a billion-dollar ATM into a dizzying mirror on our society. It's one big Rolling Thunder Revue of anecdotes and arguments, undiscovered geniuses and million-dollar frauds, all fueled by a fridge full of iced coffee and my own lifelong belief — that there's never been a division between art, politics, and our inner lives, and that creativity, like power, is never neutral.”

Art Is Life, according to a House of Books press release, “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.”

It’s an insider’s view — part bird’s-eye, part street level, unfailingly smartass — of a hectic watershed era in the life of our culture and our planet, and Saltz’s candid, opinionated take on it all should make both the book and the discussion delicious, nutritious treats for the intellectually and socially curious. A noted champion of pioneering creators from marginalized communities, Saltz puts it all right out there; his New York magazine essays touch on “eating and coping mechanisms, childhood and self-control, criticism, love, cancer and pandemics,” according to the magazine’s own attempt at describing something distinctly hard to summarize.

“This devastatingly brilliant and unconscionably awful book will delight and appall,” reads the headline of the book’s review in the New York-based Jewish magazine The Forward, going on to call the work “most interesting as a look inside New York City’s punditocracy.” If one were to find that its primary value, it’s undeniable that Saltz brings a singular, irreverent perspective from a ringside seat.

Tickets for the event, which takes place at the Kent Community House on Saturday, Nov. 12 at 7 p.m., are $10 and can be bundled with a book for $28.