![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/download.png\")
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Source: Art and Culture Center of Hollywood<\/p>\n Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Source: Art and Culture Center of Hollywood<\/p>\n
As part of \u201cInfluence Now\u201d, a series exploring the role of the \u201cinfluencer\u201d on contemporary culture, we interviewed five people whose work has shaped and influenced their fields in various ways. \u201cInfluence Now\u201d will appear in SLEEK 57;\u00a0subscribe to Sleek here.<\/a><\/span><\/em> We talk to the famous American critic, Jerry Saltz on why resorting to shock tactics on Facebook is the best way to get people talking about art.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":59772,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[2264,9800,3068,3524,124,9801,4496,1719],"class_list":["post-59748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-facebook","tag-influence","tag-instagram","tag-jerry-saltz","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-social-media","tag-twitter"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
\nExplore the rest of the \u201cInfluence Now\u201d series<\/i>: Goth Shakira \/<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Kimberly Drew \/\u00a0<\/span><\/a>Emily Segal \/\u00a0<\/a>Gabriel Held<\/a><\/span>
\nJerry Saltz sits in his office at New York Magazine talking on the phone. \u201cYou can change anything I say to make it work for you,\u201d says the world-famous art critic. \u201cI trust the writer. Even if I have to sound stupid or dumb, it\u2019s your work.” Given his notoriously brash online persona, it\u2019s a remarkably meek sentiment. In 2010, for instance, Saltz caused a digital storm with his very first Facebook post.
\n\u201c[T]he recent show of Marlene Dumas at David Zwirner really looks like remaking her old work and settling into photo realism,\u201d he wrote. Within minutes, the writer received hundreds of comments criticizing his remark. And it was this moment, Saltz claims, that galvanised his decision to de-stabilise the art criticism pyramid, not climb to the top of it.
\nhttps:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/Ba9Hf4ujd5V\/?hl=en&taken-by=jerrysaltz<\/a>
\nSoon after he began posting images from Medieval illuminated manuscripts depicting gruesome scenes of raucous devils slicing testicles and angels being devoured and hacked to pieces by axes. Safeguarded from the public in institutions and private collections, many of
\nthese documents have never been widely circulated, but Saltz brought them to his followers \u2013 he currently has over 249,000 on Instagram alone. Not that everyone was pleased.
\nSince then has been accused of being an outdated white male aesthetician. In 2014, he posted on Facebook what appeared to be a smartphone pic of a woman\u2019s ass, red with spank marks, captioned \u201cThis is what your critic does to artists who have been very very bad.\u201d Later, he revealed the image was by a woman who publishes weekly images of this kind on Twitter. However, the damage had already been done: by that point Facebook had already banned him, and hashtags such as #rascist, #sexist, #whitemaleprivilege and #sexcrazed had emerged condemning him. The critic remains unrepentant. \u201c[They\u2019d say] \u2018Oh Jerry you want to stick a sword in young students\u2019 asses.\u2019 And [I\u2019d reply] \u2018this is a work of art, you idiot.\u2019\u201d
\nhttps:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/BaZXY4ZgMEE\/?hl=en&taken-by=jerrysaltz<\/a>
\nSaltz considers these stunts to be strategic. He contends that by staging arguments via Instagram comments for months on end, he\u2019s injecting old masterpieces back into mainstream discourse.
\n\u201cArt is like tuberculosis,\u201d he says. \u201cOnce it comes it never goes away.\u201d This is a recurrent analogy in the Chicagoan\u2019s imagination, and he genuinely believes his often crude provocations have the potential to change culture or at least open up new ways of talking about it, critics be damned.
\nDespite the denunciations levelled at these interventions, Saltz\u2019s bludgeoning manner is at least direct. \u201cNow is not the time to only show good little humanist art,\u201d he proffers with an aside upbraiding the quality of Seventies Kosovan minimalism. “Instead, we should start looking at ourselves. In fact, we should ban males from exhibiting for the next two years. Let\u2019s say no man can show, we will only show women, b a d w o m e n , terrible women, great women, and if the art world dies in those two years, we can kick them out again. But my guess is nothing bad will happen. The art world needs to get out of its own ass, frankly.\u201d
\nhttps:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/Bb3GirnjbU7\/?hl=en&taken-by=jerrysaltz<\/a>
\nBut what if Saltz stopped reviewing or posting male artists for two years, would that change anything? \u201cI migrated to Instagram and Twitter for politics after being banned from Facebook, I\u2019m happy with speaking with pictures, that\u2019s my first language,\u201d he replies. And maybe he has a point.
\nAfter I hang up, I see the potentially ageist, sexist harm in policing every image as if it was a dormant terror cell, cleansing the world of nasty images would be the same as cleansing the world of \u201cnasty women\u201d, an authoritarian populism that in fact rejects the rupture of the screen, rather than leaving it grease-free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"