News from the United States. The Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz it's ready for his new publication. Indeed, seems that publishing deal came very early for the critic, just after an outpouring of feedback from enthusiastic readers of its November 2018 issue in the New York Magazine named "How to Be an Artist". So, in March 2020, Riverhead will release the book with the same title and just in these days, Saltz presented the official cover. But, before to keep talking about the book, a short interlude of who is Jerry Saltz it's necessary for those never stumbled upon his figure.
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Born in Chicago in 1951, Jerry Saltz is an American art critic better know for his popular articles on the New York Magazine. Saltz moved to New York in 1998 where he started writing for Village Voice untile 2007. In this period Saltz worked for other important journals like Art in America, Flash Art International, Frieze and Modern Painters. The last year 2018 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, after others nomination in 2001 and 2006. Very meaningful was the declared motivation by the Pulitzer jury on the occasion of the award ceremony held at Columbia University in New York:
For the robust body of works that transmitted an astute and often captivating perspective on the visual arts in America that includes the personal, the political, the pure and the profane.
Another hilarious and famous episode was Salt's testimony about his past as distance truck driver until the age of 41, before becoming an art critic. The author is much followed by the public because of its strong facebook activity. With this activity, Saltz intends to demystify the art critic to artists and a general art audience. Married to Roberta Smith (another important voice of the New York Times) now Jerry Saltz is one of the most influential critics in the world. He worked as a guest critic at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Yale University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio Residency Program, and he was a counsellor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial. His humour, irreverence, self-deprecation and volubility have led some to call him the Rodney Dangerfield of the art world. Read more about the Main purposes of this Whitney Biennal 2019!
Now! Coming back to this new book, according to Saltz, the new material for the book, arranges from the broadly applicable to the technical. So, among the “lessons” it includes “Make Art, for Now, Not the Future;” “There Are No Wasted Days;” and “There’s No Such Thing As Fear of Success.” He delves into art historical narratives, such as the divergent ways that modernist giants Picasso and Matisse manipulated two-dimensional space. Picasso contained his figures within his canvases’ borders. “Legs don’t shoot out, nothing goes out off the side. Everything is in conversation with the four sides of the painting,” Saltz said. Matisse, on the other hand, preferred an “almost cosmic” sense of space, where body parts extend beyond the frame. Read more in the article "Jerry Saltz Offers a First Look at His New Book “How to Be an Artist”...
As declared by Saltz a few years ago: "All the great contemporary artists, educated or not, are essentially self-taught (...) I'm not looking for skills in art. The ability has nothing to do with technical competence. I'm interested in people who rethink the skill, who redefine it or re-imagine it: an engineer, for example, who builds rockets from rocks.