Jerry Saltz Quotes

I'm trying to expand the notion of curating. Exhibitions need not only take place in galleries, need not only involve displaying objects. Art can appear where we expect it least.

I think 21st century should be art without objects.

The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

Art is a thing where, the least likely thing that you think is going to be art, is precisely the thing that is going to be art. And I would even hold that true to a reality television show... maybe the entire overarching process of the show actually exists as an artistic structure.

I am particularly interested in creating a relationship between ideas of reception in conceptual art and theater.

When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol.

A theatre is not a blank page for editorial, it is not a soapbox or a Tannoy system: it is a conscience that wakes with what is happening in the space, and wakes further still in response to what people are making of it.

Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.

The perfection in theater is that it's over the second it's done.

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian.

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

I think a lot of people have the Frank Lloyd Wright model in their brains. The architect comes in with this act of creation and lays it down, and that's it. But that's not me.

Frank Lloyd Wright... his things were beautiful but not very functional.

I've always liked artists like Chris Burden, who would take performances, put them in galleries, and then do things that were on the edge.

I was on Kanye's Yeezus tour as a dancer, but really, I was a Vanessa Beecroft model. I was one of the three 'dancers' who couldn't dance and was more of an accessory than an individual. Vanessa was pretty involved. Her style is about a lot of standing. It's very simple but haunting.

I think that in my plays you can come in for 20 minutes and get something out of it. I'd like to do a play that would run for days. I don't think time is that important. Nature doesn't hurry the sky, the changing clouds and sunsets.

David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

There's a romance and power to live theater.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

Film is not as exhilarating, not as physically, mentally, or spiritually challenging, as theatre.

I love the power of theater. I think it's an experience you never forget.

I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.