THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Jerry Saltz:
Whatever works for you. How long are we gonna speak?
Miriam Schulman:
We can go for, I mean, usually around 30 minutes. Sometimes it’s a little more. Do you have a hard stop?
Jerry Saltz:
Nope.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay.
Jerry Saltz:
I can go for hours. That’s what she said. Go on.
Speaker 3:
It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place Podcast, an Art World Insider podcast, full artist by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman:
Well, hey there, Artpreneur. This is Miriam Schulman, your curator of inspiration, and you’re listening to episode number 244 of the Inspiration Place Podcast. All right, so are you tired of me talking about it by now? Well, don’t worry. Artpreneur is officially out, so if you want to get your hands on that book, go to your nearest English-speaking bookstore or library and request your copy. I also recorded the audiobook, so if you like listening to the podcast, well you can listen to the book. We also have snippets from our podcast guests weaved in throughout the book, which was so super fun to put together. And I know you’re going to love it. You’re also gonna love today’s interview, so it is so super juicy. It’s a little bit on the long side, but every minute is worth it. So we’re just gonna dive right in. Let’s go.
Today’s guest is one of our most watched writers about art and artists and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s, he has been an indispensable cultural voice, witty and provocative. He has attracted contemporary listeners to fine art. As few critics have an early champion of forgotten and overlooked women artist. So he was doing it long before it became cool. I just want you to know, he has also celebrated the pioneering work of African-American LGBTQ and other long-marginalized creators. Sotheby’s Institute of Art has called him simply in the air quotes, the art critic. What does your wife have to say about that? So, we’ll, we’ll get to that too. He has a very famous art critic wife. Now in Art is Life. He draws on two decades of work and to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times
Art is Life offers his eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker Hoof Clint and Jasper Johns and Provo, like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Marina Abramovic and visionaries like Jackson Pollock, Bill Trailer and William de Kooning. He celebrates landmarks like the Obama portraits by Ken Wiley and Amy Sherald, and offers surprising takes on figures from Thomas Kincaid to Kim Kardashian. And he shares stories of his own haunted childhood, his time as a failed artist, and his epiphanies upon beholding works by Botticelli deco and the cave paintings of New, with his signature blend of candor and conviction, he argues in art’s life for the importance of the fearless artist reminding us that art is a kind of channeled voice of human experience, a necessary window unto our times. The result is an open-hearted and irresistibly enjoyable appraisal by one of our most important cultural observers. Please welcome to The Inspiration Place, Jerry Saltz. Well, hey there, Jerry, welcome to the show.
Jerry Saltz:
I love that introduction. Miriam, thank you. Thank you, thank you. It’s great to be here. And I can answer your first question first. My wife, who’s the co-chief art critic at the New York Times, Roberta Smith. I have always written and have always said, and said, so on the night I won the Pulitzer in 2018. Roberta, I think is the greatest writing art critic alive right now. And one of the greatest of all time. I consider myself more a folk critic. She is the real deal. If you really, really wanna get to the core, the laville core of our criticism, Reid, Roberta and I say that as a egomaniac in love with his own work.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay, so for those of you who don’t know, I’m a New Yorker, and so I know what a big deal Jerry Salz says. He’s the, he was the art critic, first of the Village Voice and then New York Magazine. And I actually did not know you were married to Roberta. I had seen on Instagram, there was some picture of you and you said, my wife Roberta. And I thought it was a joke, like you were just like saying like, this is my artwork, because that would be the art royalty in my mind. And then I then I read your book it like, oh no, they actually aren’t married. Just like, oh, this is so cool.
Jerry Saltz:
<laugh>. We’ve been together since 1986, a night in 1986 where two essential sort of cosmic orphans got together and we never have spent a minute apart since, which may or may not be a recommendation for a great relationship.
Miriam Schulman:
Well, when she goes to like reporting on art shows, you go with her. I mean, are you guys like look at each other, what each other thinks? So when you write things <laugh> like, is there like some sort, do you ever like have conflict, like she loves something and you hate it?
Jerry Saltz:
First of all, that’s a hard no. Roberta and I both see about 25 to 30 shows a week in New York. The word New York is in both of the titles of the publications we work for. So I don’t get paid to go to Brooklyn, let alone to the fancy Documenta and Venices and the art fairs. We see our shows. We might arrive in a neighborhood together in the early afternoon and then see our shows. And then usually when all of you are say, going to openings from six to eight, it’s good for us because it means the galleries are open two hours past six. So we’re there with you saying hi. And um, then when it’s time to go to the parties, the dinners, the drinks, which we’re both very lucky to be invited to every single one, thank God we slip away, go to a crapola little pizza place that sells pizza by the slice, usually on 10th Avenue and 25th Street on paper plates, and go over our notes and bicker and talk to and agree and disagree with one another about what we’ve seen.
Miriam Schulman:
And then we go home to our respective computers in our apartment and begin sort of making those into lists and ideas and whatnot. That’s our life. Our life from the outside might sound really glamorous, and it is the best life I ever, ever, and I spend part of every day thinking how lucky I am to do this, especially as a late bloomer. But we’re really not part of any world. We haven’t gone out to a sit down dinner in over a decade. It’s just mine at least is race against time. And I started very late, Roberta started very early, but has more and better things to say. So what we wanna do is have this life I that criticism built and which means being happily at work all the time. So I hope you’re all having fun out there.
Jerry Saltz:
Yeah, so I loved in the acknowledgements when you talk about the multi creature that you’re always thinking about when you’re writing and creating, because I too, just like you just said out there, I am always aware of whoever has pulled themselves a chair up to like this conversation we’re having right now. I’m very aware of that multi eyed creature. So that was so beautifully. Mm-hmm. But so there were holy cow, so many times I was underlying, and I put, like, when I read a book, I always read the real book. I don’t, not a Kindle person. So I put in the front, uh, this is gonna be for the people watching on YouTube, I’m sorry, podcasters. So I put in the front, like I write notes in the front of the, wow, there were a lot. We may not get past the first chapter, which is gonna make it sound like I haven’t read it, but I absolutely did. So what I’m doing for our listeners is if you buy Art Is Life by Jerry Saltz and you go to SchulmanArt.com/Jerry, we’re putting a special page up. Enter your name and email and your order number. I don’t care where you buy it, buy it anywhere. And I will send you my notes from the book.
Miriam Schulman:
Wow. I want everyone to read her notes and then yell at me about them and yell at her. And I’ll also try to answer them. So I can’t wait to see these notes. All right. Because I need notes.
Well, we’re gonna talk about it right now. I’m just like, okay. So this first thing I wrote down, I would love this to be the title of my next book. It’s called, all right. So what I’m gonna do, Jerry, is I’m gonna just quote you from the book, but don’t feel you have to remember what you wrote about in the book. You can just riff from whatever it is. So, okay. All right. So, uh, what I wrote down is creativity is a survival strategy.
Jerry Saltz:
Yeah. Thank you. I think that we all experienced that recently when we returned to the conditions of cave painting during Covid in March, 2020. I think that Darwin never said, and he made this very clear that survival of the fittest was not what he said. He said, it is survival of those most able to adapt. And that’s what creativity is. Artists, all of us went into a much smaller space than we were accustomed to living and working in. We began making what we make out of what was ever at hand, out of whatever materials we could get in whatever way we could get them. And in whatever timeframe we could, this room that we worked in was suddenly not the Syncro sanct office or studio or, you know, what have you, the studio, the living room, the pharmacy, the kitchen, the playroom where children are running around, where Nana is taking care of the dog.
This became all one room, and we returned to those roots. And I wanna say that every single one of us could not be here after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, had we not been able to creatively adapt every single step of the way, it’s a miracle and we’re still going. So yeah, I think that you’re made out of creativity. That’s every single element in gene and r rna in your body is made to do it. The problem is, there’s a very mean sister or brother or best friend that lives in your mouth that is always going well. You don’t really know what you’re doing. Your hair’s no good. You didn’t go to the right school. You’ve got terrible ankles. You’re not creative. You know, you’re faking everyone out. And a lot of what I write is geared toward all of our 3:00 AM demons that always speak to us.
And I try to usher people through those every single nights of the soul and day. I’m 71 years old today, Miriam not, this isn’t my birthday. I’m 71 today, but I woke up this morning feeling foul. Why? Because I knew my work was no good, that I didn’t have anything new to say. And yet for me, because I’m so desperate for me, I have to beat those demons back by getting to work as fast and as early in the day as I possibly can. I wanna be a gate opener. I write what I call a, a, a criticism of permission. So the long answer to your short quote was very simply, that is creativity. We have to find a way to get through.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. There’s so many things we can talk about right now, but I am gonna just talk about, so I just finished, uh, my book is coming out next month as well. And one of the things that set me free is when I was, I didn’t have this type of mind drama when it came to creating my art. I don’t know why, but when it came time to write a book, I suddenly had all kinds of demons coming out. And I said to Eric Mazzeo, I understand about the shitty first draft. And this says, no, Miriam, what you don’t understand is you have to be willing to write a shitty first book.
Jerry Saltz:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. That’s smart. And
Miriam Schulman:
Once I understood that, it set me free. Now you said something kind of really beautiful here. Everyone in the art world is learning on the job.
Jerry Saltz:
Absolutely.
Miriam Schulman:
That was something I had to say to myself as, as well as like, I don’t know what I’m doing, but nobody does. Yeah.
Jerry Saltz:
Right. No, nobody knows. I have gone to the top of the mainframe of the corporation, and I’m gonna be completely frank. And not from a cynical place. No one knows exactly what they are doing. All of us. I never know. And I’m sure, Miriam, you agree with this? I never know what I’m gonna write until I’ve written it. Artists never quite know what they’re gonna make until they make it. It’s like Bob Dylan said, there’s a ghost writing the songs. And it, in a sense, picked you. It’s about leaving yourself open as you know. Miriam, what’s your book on
Miriam Schulman:
The Entrepreneur?
Jerry Saltz:
Wow.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. You know, the, the stuff that you would like. It’s about marketing, but what I, I do dive into art history. So like, for example, I talk about willingness to believe in yourself. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And the example I use is one of your favorite artists, Alice Neal. So I said, here’s this woman who was creating figurative art during a time when that wasn’t the most popular. That was like, it was the abstract expressionist was like, where, you know, downtown. And at the same time, so I’m writing the book, during last year we had Alice Neal at The Metropolitan, and we had Julie Martu at the Whitney. So now here is this Ethiopian artist who you would think would be working in a figurative style because that’s what’s hot right now. And she’s working an abstract so about believing yourself so hard because you even what you do that you really feel the world would miss out if you didn’t do it. So
Jerry Saltz:
Yeah. Yeah. You have to be as
Miriam Schulman:
The mindset book too.
Jerry Saltz:
That’s beautiful. Miriam, you listeners, you have to be as delusional as Miriam just sounded. You have to believe at three 15 in the morning after, if you’ve laid yourself low and you just feel crap, Ola, you have to then the only way out and never wake up the person next to you. It’s boring. It’s a buzzkill. It’s not sexy. You will never change. They begin to resent you for it. And God knows they should. They’re living with a person that has no skin while they’re working. You have to believe and finish these weird diatribes against yourself with the little thing that I say to myself, but I’m a Fulton genius. Just the way Miriam sounded like. Yikes. The point she’s making is very simple. No matter what you’re reading, looking at, watching, whether you like this work or not, they’re somewhere in it. There is courage.
There is courage that that person mustered to make the work. And there had to also be at least some love of having made it. I don’t mean the finished product because nothing’s ever perfect, but I mean, love during moments of that process of the flow when you get in it and you’re like, wow, where did that come from? And every word you hear on your Spotify song list makes sense in whatever you’re doing. And you paint it or you write it when all of that is happening. And I want to tell your listeners something else about what Miriam said. She said, you know, you’re gonna write a shitty first draft and a shitty first book. In other words, finish the damn thing you big babies, it will never be perfect. Finish the fucker. I’m sorry. Every artist and writer I know is running out the door as the painting is in the truck, going to the gallery with the paintbrush trying to make better. Well, it’s not gonna be perfect. The best is always yet to come.
Miriam Schulman:
I mean, that is really the, the human condition is that we are created to continue to evolve. That is the whole purpose of our life. So we’re always gonna have that not enoughness. It’s no, you can’t therapy or drug yourself out of that. You’re always gonna have that. Right. You just have to be willing to be bad first also.
Jerry Saltz:
Yeah. And I always wonder, artists, I can’t work. I’m gonna be bad. I’m gonna be mediocre. And I always say to my students, how difficult can it be to make mediocre work in your studio? I do it every day in my office. And unfortunately, without knowing it, I sometimes publish that. Of course, I think what I’m writing is bulletproof. You, when you turn in your novel or your book, rather, Miriam secretly thinks this motherfucker is so great.
Miriam Schulman:
Oh, I, I thought I was the next Julia camera on. And yes, my developmental editor handed it back to me. In my mind it was like the scene in Harry Potter when he hit the bass looks thing and like stabbed the diary. And then all these inks spurted from the pages. Like that’s what my, that’s what my manuscript looked like. It was all the red, well, it wasn’t ink because it was, you know, the Microsoft Word <laugh> edit. But it’s like, holy cow, I I was right. I didn’t know what I was doing. I should get my advance back.
Jerry Saltz:
And then, and then you learn the truth that all writers and artists know. There is no such thing as writing. There is only rewriting. And really, I have found that as for writers listening to this, I would say I have never had an editor that didn’t make my work better than it was. And in fact, when you have great editors, they make you better than you are. I often read my work and get to the best part. And I know I didn’t write that quite. It was somebody else that stuck some idea in there, and then I rewrote it for them. So just get the work artists, it’s not that hard to make bad art. We all do it all the time. Th this is an all volunteer army. Creativity. If you don’t want to be in the art world or writing world or whatever world, you don’t have to be in it. It’s a horrible way to make money. It’s a great life. But I wouldn’t wish it on a dog because it means you’re going to be alone a lot of the time. A lot of the time. And so you better be happy if you’re doing this, even though we’re all unhappy while doing it secretly thinking, I’m so happy.
Miriam Schulman:
No, we can stay on any one of these points for like hours. But the next thing I wrote down, which I, I wanna talk about art is never neutral.
Jerry Saltz:
Right? What did you take from that, Miriam?
Miriam Schulman:
Well, there’s a couple of things. I took <laugh>, like there was like a theme going on here. So one of the things I tell artists in my book is embrace your inner weirdo. Mm. And about you can’t be neutral. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Like even if you’re not creating political art, like you, you don’t have to paint a picture of Trump with horns on it if you don’t like Trump. But you can’t like not talk about it. And this, there’s examples throughout art history, like the 19th century where the, the French all went to war on the anti Dreyfus affair. And when war wanted to be neutral. And I see so many artists who are suffering from mediocre results because they wanna please everybody. They wanna be people pleasers. They wanna be mm-hmm. <affirmative> pleasers with their art. They wanna be people pleasers with their politics. They wanna be people pleasers with their opinions. And so nobody knows what they think and nobody cares then what they’re doing.
Jerry Saltz:
Right. I wanna build on what Miriam is brilliantly saying and just to add that all of us are living in the present. We all are living with P T S D. We have all lived through, if you’re my age, two contested elections, the Bush Cheney war machine, the rise of the arc of, uh, history turning towards justice. And then the re onset of the long American night with Republicanism to another contested election to two pandemics. The first being Covid and the second, as the angel of death walked among us, people Miriam’s age and younger all took to the streets after George Floyd was murdered. And basically said, we’ve talked the talk these decades. We’ve all been good little humanists and liberals, but now it’s time to try to start walking the walk. All of that deep content my loves is in your work. Even if you’re just telling loves, uh, singing, love songs, painting, still lifes stripes, a book about entrepreneurism or a book about cooking.
The deep content of now is there. You’re never even when you say you’re neutral, reir, for example, he’s anything but neutral about two big things. One is his idea of what a painting is. Nobody had ever had that idea before that it should be made. He and Van Gogh and a few others thought and Syrah thought it should be made of every single paint stroke showing at the same time congealing into a picture. So you see every mark and the hole at the same time. Therefore, no part of a renoir is any more or less important than any other part cuz it’s each a mark. Like Pollocks drips much later, he had an idea about feeling the physicality of surface and they were all hated for that, which is fine. And he loved his subject matter, which was leisure life of the middle class and women. Women, women. Yes. He was like a breast man. He was the Russ Meyer of his time. Now we hate that. That’s fine with me. You wanna put him in the basement of art museums for being dickish. I’m fine with that. But I would remind you that his idea about what a painting was was insanely radical and revolutionary and led to the life we live now.
Miriam Schulman:
So beautiful. Oh, by the way, I’m probably older than you think. I’m 54.
Jerry Saltz:
Hey, well, I’m looking at her and as an old man, everybody looks young.
Miriam Schulman:
<laugh>. It’s also the zoom filters of very kind <laugh>. Okay? So artists can change the way we understand the world.
Jerry Saltz:
Yes. Artists art doesn’t change the world. If you wanna stop the spread of aids in sub-Saharan Africa with your work, you’re not going to, if you wanna stop famine or the Covid virus, you’re not going to do it. However, art does change lives and minds and lives, and people change the world. Art does change the world. That means by osmosis, it has been said that fog did not exist in pictures until the artists of the 19th century, like Whistler and others started painting it. It has been said that there was no LA noir right until Raymond Chandler and Dashel Hammett started writing it. I could argue there were no images of pregnancy until Alice Neal gave us about 30 pictures of pregnancy, which are the greatest pictures of this human condition that have ever been created. And they were created in many of your lifetimes, as strong as her images are of pregnancy.
So were the cave painters, paintings of mammals that no one has ever rendered better. I don’t remember how I got on this, but that’s what changes the world. It changes the d n a of how you see. You have to understand combining this thing that Miriam, uh, mentioned with how art is never neutral. Michelangelo’s Cistine Chapel is a, a powerful political work of art that would’ve been seen in its own time as insanely anti reformation, as powerfully counter reformation to the changes going on in Great Britain and Germany where they were saying, no, we should destroy all images and idols. Iconoclasm, the destruction of idols never goes away. It’s rooted so deep in our human species that God, him or herself, the Old Testament, God said, thou sht have no other gods before me for I the Lord your God, and the jealous God. And thou sht not make unto the any graven images or sculptures or, you know, carved, rendered in stone. In other words, this God knows there are other gods in the Mediterranean, in Greece, <laugh>, and in Egypt and in Italy and at the end of the Silk Road. And so just wants to, like all artists, basically claim it all for her or himself. And so images are very powerful to get back to Miriam’s point, maybe art,
Miriam Schulman:
I think it’s your point,
Jerry Saltz:
<laugh> Well, but I think similar point may not be able to change the world, but it changes us.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. What you said is, artists can change the way we understand the war, and that is what ultimately changes the world because it changes the way we think. Yes. So you mentioned Alice Neal with the pregnant, I mean, we, we didn’t have images of pregnant woman. We had, you know, least Lucy ball, like sleeping in the twin beds and nobody showed pregnant woman on tv, let alone a nude woman, let alone a nude pregnant woman in labor. Holy cow. Revolutionary. Yeah.
Jerry Saltz:
It’s too object for the rules to be men. Make the rules. We have a couple of rules for men. No erections ever. Okay? You can’t see them. You can depict any fucking thing about a woman. But men are terrified. You know, we’re afraid that other people are gonna know that this is too big and that’s too small and we all look like frogs. Okay? And the other is, men cannot wear women’s dresses. Now, I’m not sure why an opening at the bottom of a garment is so powerful, and I wish that women would somehow write and talk about that. What does it feel like to wear a skirt or a dress? I wore one, one time at an art fair, an artist gave me a kind of designer dressed to wear. And it was the most extraordinary half hour I ever spent in my life by far. Uh, really? Maybe, you know, whatever. I just felt so exposed, vulnerable, sexy, wildly in contact with the world around me. I wanted to walk around that way forever. Am I sick? No. I just loved the feeling.
Miriam Schulman:
Interesting. All right. I’m like, okay, spinning the, the rule out. Like, what should I land on next? Holy cow. There’s so many things. All art is a kind of exorcism,
Jerry Saltz:
Right? That means art and writing. Job one for the artist, the writer, the filmmaker, is to embed thought in material. Okay? Art is the greatest operating system our species has ever devised for exploring and fathoming consciousness, the scene and the unseen worlds. You can’t take a photo of hell, you can only embed your ideas of it. So the quote you read to me about the exorcism means that whatever it is that is in you, good, bad, magnificent, shameful, you know, traumatized as we all are, all of that is simply going into the material of your work. In that sense, it’s left you and it now dwells for fucking ever in the form of inanimate material. This is what is meant by the burning bush that more energy is emanating say from the play Hamlet than went into it. The writer wrote it, and it was a story everybody in the world knew at the time.
There was no biggie, just like Romeo and Juliet. Every person knew that. But the way it was embedded in that form, he invented love, poetry and young love. The point being, it can exist in the title artists, and you may make a wall label artists, but it can’t be a long wall label that explains that. Okay, I’m an Estonia, illegal Estonia immigrant. You’ve heard me maybe tell the story before my father came escaping Stalin. Nobody made it out except my father and mother. They came here illegally. That’s my backstory. That’s a true story. It would be as if I went to Estonia, brought a canvas from America, uh, to bring it back to the homeland, covered it in mud in a roller, and made a monochrome brown painting, brought it to the Red Sea and bathed it in that water where my people came from. And then let it dry on the contested Gaza Strip, hanging it in a museum saying, the work is about the diaspora. The truth is, what I made is a boring, generic, monochrome fucking painting. None of my big ideas embedded in the work and too much art that we’re seeing right now. My loves including your work. Sometimes you’re allowed to have the title and the label, but get to the point, keep it simple, stupid. So I don’t remember where I started. I think it
Miriam Schulman:
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t
Jerry Saltz:
Exorcism exorcism get it into the material so the material can have a second undead life. Art is the undoing of death. Yes. You’re dying now. Yes. You’re just embedding that moment in your idiot material where it will live somehow. We don’t know how yet, because art is using us to replicate itself. It’s very simple. To me. It’s a cosmic force.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay, so I’m gonna depart a little bit from the quotes now because this is getting to something that I wanted to talk to you about. And one of my motivations is mortality motivation. And I like you, I lost my father when I was very young. So I was five years old when he passed away.
Jerry Saltz:
How did he die?
Miriam Schulman:
Cancer.
Jerry Saltz:
Okay, what cancer?
Miriam Schulman:
Uh, melanoma.
Jerry Saltz:
And you were there as a five-year-old with memory intact or no memory intact. Miriam,
Miriam Schulman:
My memory is being at the funeral and asking where he is. Nobody good told me.
Jerry Saltz:
Nobody told you. Where’d you grow up? In what suburb?
Miriam Schulman:
This is in Florida in the 1970s. And so they didn’t, they didn’t talk to children then the way they do now. No. So it was like, let’s protect the children, just let them be children. Just let, right. So I grew up with this idea of death very young, at a very early age. And it has always motivated me to know that. Now what you were saying before about leaving it all here, leaving it all on the canvas, leaving it all on the page. This has been my motivation as an artist this whole time. So I, when I started off as a painter, I was painting portraits because I was creating mortality, not just for myself, but for the person I was painting and for the family. Like I was creating this heirloom when I wrote this book, it was about putting 20 years of my experience into the book imperfectly. Like we said, we can make our bad. There’s something you, you say here we’ll get to in a moment. Putting it all out there, not taking anything with me and leaving it all behind and having that mortality motivation. We don’t know how long we have and there may not be a someday and we have to get it out. Now. That was just my, my motivation. I know that you lost your mother when you were young as well. So how much of legacy and mortality motivation plays a part in your life?
Jerry Saltz:
Every person listening to this comes to this moment from trauma. You just heard some of Mary Miriam’s story. Yours is the exact same, more or less listeners. That is not. In fact, when Miriam told her story, I want you to note something. It wasn’t, uh, charged and powerful and world ending. I would ask Miriam, is that not your simply, that’s your normal, right?
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Jerry Saltz:
Yeah. Each one of your traumas is your normal. When you tell other people about it and they get all upset, you always want to go, eh, it’s, it’s just what happened. First of all, when you do around the death traumas, when somebody dies, they don’t die. A part of you dies. Their memory of you no longer exists. So that part of you ceases to exist and can never exist again. So you are actually diminished. That to me is part of what mourn is. In my case, my mother, when I was 10 years old, my mother committed suicide by jumping out of a hospital window. I returned home into our Jewish suburb on a Sunday. I noticed there were a lot of cars parked outside. A lot of old people, Jewish people were sitting in our living room looking sad in black suits and the women in black dresses and with food around. And I said to my father, well, what happened? He said, well, your mother’s gone away. Not unlike Miriam’s story.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s exactly my story. Yeah. Now, I, my my memory of him dying was being at that party with people wearing black. Yeah. And I said, where is daddy? And they go, he’s dead. I said, so when’s he coming back? I was five years old.
Jerry Saltz:
Yes. How would it not? I asked that too. When’s he coming back? And my father, or when she’s coming back and my father, I said, where is she? When’s she coming back? He said, she’s with the angels. From that day to this day of this podcast when I was 10 and I’m 71, it was never mentioned again in my life, ever. Not once the word suicide never came up as Miriam did. As all of you listening to this, I grew invisible antenna after these traumas to perceive the world, connect to it, to protect myself from it. I would wear secret armors that either made myself visible or invisible. An act that created an illusion of a strong hall or whatever the case may be. How I got into art, however, is about a week or two before this event. My mother had driven me alone in our Buick, into the city of Chicago, from our Chicago suburb, left me all alone in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Just parked me there. I don’t know how, I don’t know why. I just remember wandering around being unbelievably bored of what I was seeing. It was horrific art. What was art? I never even knew what it was until a painting stopped me. And I don’t wanna get into the whole story because it’s long, but after looking back and forth at this dipt tick by Giovane d Pelo of the beheading of St. John the Baptist, back and forth. And suddenly my world shifted and I understood that this picture was telling a story. And the museum and art turned into an ecstasy machine for me. A wormhole where everything around me was speaking in tongues and telling a story. Then my mother died or disappeared or committed suicide. And I never thought art. I thought about art again until I did in my twenties. So these things are embedded in all of you, right?
So you do not have to work that hard. I guess I would also say to people, men, you tell your secrets too much. And I’m an essentialist. We’re always showing our dicks. And it’s like this and what we think of women and their boob pictures, and you know, you already know what we’re thinking. I often think that women die with secrets and men die with lies. Now, secrets to me are turned in and lies are turned out. I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, but it seems to me that every single time that women speak their inner lives and their secret lives, they change the world without exception. Look at 19th century when the first time women are allowed to really make art in earnest is in the 19th century with writing that changed literature. Mary Shelley invented a genre one night called the Gothic.
Look at Jolene, the song by Dolly Parton takes a generic form, an almost dead form country in western same three chords, same time signature tells the same love story every song tells, but she says something from a new point of view. The discredited narrative, the discontinuous narrative of women is told with words like this, real simple, I could never compete with you. You’re, you know, don’t take him just because you can. That simple voice of a woman’s point of view, of pregnancy, of a love triangle had never been told before. We were living in art, creativity, apartheid, where 51% of the population quite simply was not being allowed to tell their stories or having to hide them in an economy of secrets. Because until very recently, Miriam and any woman listening to this would know that economy is dear because you could be killed if you reveal too much. You live in physical danger. You have literal skin in the game. I’ve never turned the key of my apartment and looked left righter and back of me. Think about that freedom that I have that none of you have. Finally, I wanted to come back all the way around to this. I had a good idea while I was yammering. One second.
Miriam Schulman:
You have so many good ideas you, oh,
Jerry Saltz:
I’m making, but I’m trying. Women, you also
Miriam Schulman:
Talk about, I’m
Jerry Saltz:
Gonna, oh wait, I wanted to say this. I feel this particularly personally because after my mother died, my father remarried and then that mother died. So I grow up. I, my whole life is testosterone and I loathe it. It’s five brothers a father, no grandmother’s, no nuance, no nieces, no girl cousins. So for me, the greatest loss in all of creativity is my inability to really have been exposed to 51% of the population. That’s all I was gonna add. Oh, okay. All right. And I don’t think women are better artists, and I don’t think they’re worse. I think they’re artists. Period.
Miriam Schulman:
Were you happy with the Venice bi? With, uh, what the curator, um,
Jerry Saltz:
Cecilia Ali
Miriam Schulman:
Alani, yeah.
Jerry Saltz:
I wasn’t able to make it, but in 1996 I wrote that if you put 51% of the show of all women, or even 80%, the show wouldn’t be much worse or much better. It turns out this show had about 80 to 90% women. And it was great. It, it’s really no surprise. And to everybody with, you know, twisted, uh, wadded shorts and panties, listening to this going, all this inclusion, all this diversity. There’s all this mediocrity coming into the art world. And it’s true. It’s true. All the TV you’re seeing is shit. A lot of it. Every film, a lot of art. But I would tell you, there’s no more mediocrity of art by women or artists of color than there was from white male artists. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, if you know art, and you know the art of Sean Scully, who makes big blurry boxes and stripes, he sells for a million bucks and he’s like, got a great career and he’s mediocre. What I will tell people before I stop this diatribe of love of art, I will just say, as a 71 year old, I’ve learned that give it time. It all washes out. The mediocrity always disappears over time. So don’t worry about there being all these mediocre est artists showing, or artists of color or women or whatever that you’re thinking secretly at home. The answer is yes, but no more or less than have ever shown. Sorry, Miriam, what were you gonna say? I have
Miriam Schulman:
No idea. No, I have got a million. I have a million thoughts. Uh,
Jerry Saltz:
There’s no wasted days. Every minute you’re working and not working artists that’s helping you just get into your studio. Just stay there. Your big babies.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. I love the way you keep coming back to this, the, Ooh,
Jerry Saltz:
I didn’t start writing. Oh, you
Miriam Schulman:
Said about the lack of women’s art. So this isn’t exact quote, but you said the lack of women in the art world in museums is a moral emergency. Is what, how you put it.
Jerry Saltz:
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s a moral cosmic con, uh, emergency of consciousness itself. Imagine what was lost, because we can’t, you don’t, we think about half percent of all Greek literature and philosophy exists because all of it was burned as pagan. It’s very simple. We only have a few plays by our greatest playwrights. Saffo exists only as a poet from tiny scraps of paper that were found wrapping, uh, post Roman mummies. You understand? We have upmost of Socrates because his work was all banned, but the old work was used to wrap mummies. There’s no reason. So at the point being that the art, we don’t want to see this happen again, don’t let this art disappear on your watch. If you can help it. You don’t have to say everything is good. Critics have gotten so timid and boring. Everything is good. They say, me, me, me, me, me. That’s impossible. I believe as a critic, being critical of work is a way of showing art respect.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay,
Jerry Saltz:
I got a negative review in the New York Times. Of course, it
Miriam Schulman:
Hurts everybody. Dai Lama gets negative reviews.
Jerry Saltz:
It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. You don’t get defined by, um, rejection.
Miriam Schulman:
No. And like, if you don’t get bad reviews, that means you didn’t try hard enough. You didn’t say enough. You
Jerry Saltz:
Didn’t, maybe you
Miriam Schulman:
Didn’t go to that place.
Jerry Saltz:
Good luck. Call me when you get your bad reviews. It’s not that bad. It’s not that bad. Really phone
Miriam Schulman:
Number. Okay? So I’m gonna end with this one. I have a lot of quotes to remember. Like I said, if you go to SchulmanArt.com/Jerry and enter your name and email and you buy the book, that’s important, buy the book, enter your name, email, and order number, and I will send you my notes from having read. Art is Life. Jerry Salts, one more thing. You can click on one of the links, you can buy it on Amazon. Hopefully it’s on BookDepository.com cuz that’s where my international listeners can get it with free worldwide shipping. We don’t care where you get it, get it from your local bookstore. Heck, you know what? You can even request it from your library, but then you’re gonna have to figure out how to prove it to me that you got it. So enter your name, your email, your order number, and I will send you my favorite quote from the book. But we’re gonna end with this. Bad art can tell you as much as good art, since I think that’s been the theme of what we’ve been talking about today,
Jerry Saltz:
Isn’t it The truth? You know, you look at those pictures at the end of every summer of a million white people going up Everest, right? And they’re in traffic jams up there. It’s like an art fair on the top of Mount fucking Everest. But the truth is, and this applies very much to art, literature, food, traveling, everything. You cannot know how high a mountain is unless you know the scale of the mountains around it, the valleys, the nooks, the crannies, the swes, the blah, blah, blah. All the way. The more you know, the better bad art will tell you what’s missing in it. If you get very quiet while you’re looking at art, you start to hear yourself saying, well, why is that so big? Is it maybe that’s just big and it has no sense of scale. Or an artist isn’t developing. Gee, this artist seems to be using their bag of tricks. This is why I think for artists, listeners, that you may have, it’s good to live with your work a long time. Artists, because you know the ones that are misbehaving in your studio, you’re looking at them going, oh, yayy, yay. Look at that act up in the upper left hand corner. There’s that green again. I used, and you may before the truck comes for change it at the last minute. The same way Miriam before he, she sends her final draft in. We’ll be putting changes in at the last minute the way I am.
Miriam Schulman:
I totally did. I told like I re like, after I got that back, I rewrote it and I was like, yeah, thank God they criticized me. Not just because of the things I agreed with, but actually when they disagreed with me and I realized, oh, I didn’t make my case strong enough. Smart, smart. And I changed it to dig deeper into what I was saying.
Jerry Saltz:
Very smart. Miriam, I I’m with you a hundred percent, a hundred percent on that. I know that art is different that somebody else can’t tell you. But if you have five or six friends you really trust, they’ll tell you when something’s working. If somebody says to you from the outside, oh, well that’s been done before, as will be said to Miriam, well, some of those books have been written before. I always tell Artis and writers, then do it again, then write it again. My guess is it will be different. When you’re an artist, do say 10,000 of them and after that or a hundred, ask your friends, is it different enough or does it still look like you know, Bruce Nowman? And if it still does, that’s an artist, you just stop. So everything is telling you something. Whatever your obsession is, if it’s so, so a button on your painting, if that’s what you want.
I met a woman whose obsession was porn. She knew it so well. She knew which photographers took which pictures. And I said to her, this has to be part of your work. And it was, and she became better for it. Your fantasies aren’t politically correct. Your taste isn’t perfect. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. If you have those things, it might mean you’re a great artist, okay? And, um, just get to work you guys and make an enemy of envy tonight. When you finish this podcast, you have to look around and stop looking outside yourself about who has more money, a better apartment, a better girlfriend or boyfriend, dog or cat, better career, better education, blah, blah, blah. I have to tell you, as much as you think the point being that no one is thinking about you, nobody, you are the only one worrying about how bad you are and all that, make an enemy of envy because it will eat you alive and you become a bus kill around other people.
You’re always, you become cynical. Don’t be cynical. Just accept that every artist, even like a teletubby, like Jeff Koons is being, what they think of is sincere. Being sincere doesn’t make you good. Obviously, Oscar Wild said all bad. Poetry is sincere. Sincerity is something that everybody has so bad. Art tells you as much as good. Making bad art tells you as much as good fail flamboyantly for me. I failed that way for you. And I just love being invited by Miriam to talk to anybody about this because like you, I spent a lot of time alone in my idiot head turning things around and thank you.
Miriam Schulman:
All right. I’m so glad you’re here. So I just wanna let my listeners know, I really harassed Jerry to get him here. I was like, I saw he was on other people’s podcasts, which pissed me off. I’m like, what is wrong with your publicist? How come they didn’t approach me?
Jerry Saltz:
<laugh>? I don’t have publicists. I work alone. You know, every podcast I work out is somebody like you. My comp slip into my dms or yell at me in one of my Instagram comments going, how come you’re not on mine? And how did I respond to you? In what form?
Miriam Schulman:
You were like, just tell me more.
Jerry Saltz:
Instagram. Yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
Oh, Instagram. Oh, if you’re not following Jerry Salts, it’s hilarious. Do you curate all that content yourself?
Jerry Saltz:
Of course, nobody’s ever touched my phone. I’m too old to know how to even use YouTube or download. Yeah, I do everything.
Miriam Schulman:
That was the only difficult part. So usually when I ha invite a guest, I give them a link. They fill everything out. Everything done. I had to do it all. Like here I was, I was filling out the formation. Say, just gimme your email. I’ll fill it out. I’ll find your bio. Don’t worry. I’ll get your get your bio up here. Don’t worry. Just figure.
Jerry Saltz:
I don’t know how to do anything. I’m a last adapter, you know? And so when I do my Instagram, I’m flying by the seat of my pants. I only do what I can do. No one else has ever checked it. I read every comment. Please follow me at Jerry salts and we’ll have fun. You can yell at me, tear me a new one.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, it’s, it’s very, very entertaining, I must say. And it’s not for the fan of heart though. I mean, if you want something that’s a little bit censored, this is definitely not for you,
Jerry Saltz:
<laugh>. Sorry.
Miriam Schulman:
All right, everyone, so don’t forget SchulmanArt.com/Jerry, get the book. Art Is Life. Jerry salts bobman, Instagram and everyone out there, thank you so much for listening. I will see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired.
Speaker 3:
Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook, facebook.com/schulmanart on Instagram @SchulmanArt, and of course on schulmanart.com
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