On all accounts, Jerry Saltz is currently the best known art critic in the United States. I have no idea how many people know who he is, nor what sub-set of those who know of him have read his writings, nor what sub-sub-set have read a non-negligible percentage of them with care. But I would think that many among them know Saltz’s life-trajectory. Having attempted and abandoned a career as an artist in early adulthood, Saltz worked a variety of jobs, most notably as a long-distance truck driver, for many years. Around the age of 40 he began writing art criticism, and eventually was hired as the regular art critic for the Village Voice. Two published volumes preserve his major pieces from 1998 through 2009. For the past decade he has been the senior art critic for New York magazine and its on-line so-called ‘entertainment site’, Vulture. And on all accounts, two events have made him exceptionally well known. First he appeared in his role as an art critic in a short-lived television show, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Second, he has developed large followings on Facebook and especially Instagram, with hundreds to thousands of people ‘liking’ his posts, and dozens to hundreds of them commenting. And so finally on all accounts his status as best known American art critic results not from his writings, or his professing some fashionable doctrine, or some broad and keen interest in his accounts of contemporary artists and artworks; but rather this status is indissociably bound to his prominence in broadcast and social media. His life-trajectory is known as a consequence of his tireless public rehearsing of it in these media.
Although Saltz claims to avoid much of the international circuit of biennials and art fairs that gives contemporary visual art so much of its social physiognomy and talking points, he is as well placed as anyone to reflect upon the distinctive characteristics of the contemporary art world, its products, and the social roles internal to it, the roles assigned to curators, gallerists, critics, and of course artists. And so we are perhaps fortunate that his status as a social media celebrity has induced him to write a short book, How to Be an Artist, something that reveals not just what he takes to be involved in becoming an artist, but also what is distinctively contemporary about recent artists, and what virtues and practices they must develop to sustain themselves as artists. Saltz then offers in passing and with the lightest possible touch an account of contemporary art. What does he say?
A great deal of the book is couched as guidance for those wishing to begin to make art works, then to sustain their practice of making, and then finally to somehow enter the contemporary art world. The prose is mostly in the standard manner of a self-help book, addressing the reader directly as ‘you’, and filled with countless short imperative sentences: ‘Get to work!’; ‘You can start anytime’; ‘Get lost!’; ‘Vivisect yourself’; and on and on. The short book contains six sections, or ‘steps’: the first two about getting started making art; then one about ‘learning to think like an artist (Saltz notes that ‘this is the fun part’); then two about entering and surviving the art world; and a final odd section about ‘attaining galactic brain’ that concludes with the advice to go dancing once a year. I think one could fairly summarize the content of the book as a short series of injunctions (very much in Saltz’s own manner): 1. Just start making art. 2. Explore and play with alternative subjects, manners of rendering, and media. 3. Keep making art, even if you think it’s no good and no one likes it. 4. Be yourself, but even more so, exaggerate yourself. 5. Try to expand your social contacts in the arts; you will need at least twelve.—That’s it. Feel free to send me the money that you would have otherwise spent buying the book.
So much for the advice, which takes up perhaps 98% of the short text. What of Saltz’s artistic conceptions? Saltz initially characterizes art as follows: “One way to think about art is that it’s a visual language—usually non-verbal, arguably pre-verbal—with the power to tell us more in the blink of an eye (Augenblick, in German) than we might learn in hours of listening or reading. It is a means of expression that conveys the most primal emotions: lonesomeness, silence, pain, the whole vast array of human sensation.” (pp. ix-x) So by the term ‘art’ Saltz means something like ‘static visual art’, and he thinks that such art ‘tells us something’ in particular about the emotions (though he bizarrely includes sensations and silence among the emotions). Artworks “should express thought and emotion,” and characteristically do this by ‘embedding’ thought in material. (p. 41) In good artworks (as the popular singer Jay-Z puts it), the materials “do more work than they normally do” and “work on more than one level.” (p. 43) Accordingly, “[a] work of art is a rich estuary of material, personal, public, and aesthetic ideas.” (p. 70) Artworks arise through the exercise of the imagination, whose energy arises “from love—love of doing something”, including for example love of painting (p. 9) In sustaining oneself as an artist three virtues are helpful: persistence obviously, but also obstinacy and determination. (p. 99) There is only one vice, envy; to avoid this the artist need only “grow a backbone and get back to work.” (p. 100) Artists are successful qua artists if they have time to do their work. (p. 87)
A moment’s reflection reveals the obscurities and incoherences in Saltz’s set of conceptions. For example, the main part of his statements suggest quite plausibly that a typical artistic failure is the failure to make a work that embodies thought through putting materials to relatively extended kinds of uses; whereas his explicit statement is that the only failure in the arts is the artist’s inability to find or make time to make art. Likewise, the idea that the good contemporary artist works across a variety of media seems to conflict with his claim that an archetypal motivation for art-making is love of working in a particular medium such as painting. Further, Saltz offers no consideration, here or as far as I know elsewhere, of alternative conceptions of artistic practice. Nor does he consider here what makes the arts important in life (though his forthcoming book is alarmingly titled Art is Life), nor here or elsewhere the character of modern life that provides the framework of intelligibility for contemporary visual art. Lacking consideration of different conceptions of artistic practice, his statements float in an atmosphere of vagueness, although that might be required for Saltz’s stated audience, the anyone and everyone who thinks of becoming an artist, to find something in them. Beyond noting these evident problems and lacunae, how might one reflect on and evaluate Saltz’s conceptions of the artist, of sustaining artistic practice, and of contemporary visual art?
One route is provided by Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential conception of a practice, first introduced and explicated in his celebrated book After Virtue (1981). On MacIntyre’s proposal (in one lengthy sentence), a practice is “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” (MacIntyre (1981), p. 175) There are two kinds of goods internal to practices: the excellence of the products that result from the practice; and the goods for an individual that arise from living a life of a practitioner of a worthwhile practice (MacIntyre’s example is this latter internal good is artistic: “it is the painter’s living out of a greater or lesser part of his or her life as a painter that is the second kind of good internal to painting.” (p. 175)) There are practice-specific virtues and vices that facilitate or block the regular achievement of the goods internal to the practice. Entering a practice means (at least initially) accepting the authority of the standards of excellence internal to the practice, but in turn these standards themselves are not immune from criticism. All practices have histories, and the roles, products, and standards internal to practices are likewise historical and changing. It seems to me that bringing MacIntyre’s conception of a practice to bear on Saltz’s account immediately orders and clarifies the seemingly disparate elements of his artistic conception. So the product of an artistic practice would be an artifact that embodies thought through unusually extensive uses of materials, while the lack of time undermines the possibility for achieving such a product. The virtues and the vice proposed by Saltz are partially relieved of their sense of arbitrariness and vagueness through examination of their contribution to creating and sustaining the goods internal to the practice of art.
But what is it about Saltz’s conceptions that so much as makes them intelligible and possibly attractive to contemporary people? A further contribution by MacIntyre helps illuminate this. In works since After Virtue, MacIntyre has stressed the ways in which the point and intelligibility of a practice depends upon the larger framework of the society within which the practice is institutionalized and salient. What is this larger framework for the contemporary visual arts? In his recent Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity MacIntyre notes that it is “a commonplace in some twentieth-century writing that an artist who is deeply to her or his art may in following through on that commitment may have to violate the requirements” of morality as it is conceived and entrenched in modern societies. (MacIntyre (2016), p. 141) For MacIntyre morality takes three forms in modern life. There is the ethics of the state, wherein people are understood to have certain rights and duties by virtue of being citizens of a political state; immorality consists in violating others’ rights or in failing to carry out one’s duties. Then there is the pervasive morality of the market, wherein people understand themselves as individuals possessing desires and interests, the satisfaction of which characterizes the good life, and immorality consists in blocking others from such satisfactions. Then there is Morality proper, a system of restrictions (such as ‘do not lie’, ‘do not steal’, ‘do not cheat’) whose motivation and point is obscure, and that functions to restrict desires. It is not unusual for a modern person to feel that the three systems issue conflicting demands on how to act in a particular case.
On MacIntyre’s construction, first Oscar Wilde, and then, more searchingly, D. H. Lawrence show how an artist’s commitment to their practice might call into question morality, in one or the other or all of the modern conceptions. A character in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband says that morality “is simply the attitude that we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike”; and in a published letter Wilde himself writes that “An artist has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter.” MacIntyre comments that “Every artist is more than an artist, someone who needs to know not only what Wilde is happy to tell him, how not to live [that is, not to follow the dictates of morality], but also how to live.” (p. 142) Because Wilde refuses to submit his or any artist’s tastes and desires to any concern for consistency or any ethical conception whatsoever, MacIntyre turns to D. H. Lawrence for a more ethically strenuous conception of artistic practice than Wilde’s passive acceptance of whatever desires and tastes the artist happens to have. For Lawrence the sensations, feelings, and emotions that one happens to have are just part of the emotional defense of old, habitual ways of living. So the task of the modern artist “is to enable us to see and to feel by showing us what there is to be seen and to be felt, putting us into a new relationship to ourselves, others, to things,” (p. 147) a formulation that seems to capture also whatever crypto-ethical imperative there is behind Saltz’s scattering urgings. As Lawrence himself put it: “A new relationship between ourselves and the universe means a new morality” and “The true artist doesn’t substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser. And as soon as you see a finer morality, the grosser becomes relatively immoral.” (Lawrence (1925), pp. 521 and 525) The problem with Lawrence’s conception, so MacIntyre argues, is that it requires that habits and emotions be educable, which in turn requires that people have a desire to be educated, and that for this desire to be rational they must further have some attractive aim or standard in terms of which they can come to count as relatively uneducated or educated. But Lawrence neglects this second-order desire to be educated and the relevant teleological framework.
With these points from later MacIntyre, we can return to Saltz and start to understand what makes his artistic conceptions both attractive and profoundly dispiriting. Recall #4 from my summary of Saltz’s book: ‘Be yourself, but even more so, exaggerate yourself.’ Saltz’s conception of ‘being yourself’ in art-making is very much in the tradition of Lawrence: being yourself is not (perhaps in the manner of Wilde) expressing whatever sensations and desires you happen to have, but rather engaging in a kind of ceaseless search for those subjects, media, and manner of handling in which one might find part of oneself expressed. So perhaps the attractiveness of Saltz’s conceptions stems from their recycling of these deeply entrenched points articulated so vividly by Lawrence. But then why ‘exaggerate’? Saltz’s discussion of this on p. 49 is so brief and scattershot, but he seems to be suggesting that the artist ought not to express her individuality tout court, but rather that part of her individuality that is not expressed by other artists, lest one’s art look like someone else’s art. Saltz does not say why one person’s art looking like another’s (on first glance? after extended consideration?) is a decisive flaw, but the point is recognizable as a long-held dogma of modern and contemporary art, rooted in the peculiar Romantic doctrine that each individual person is unique in all aspects, then taken up into the marketing of artworks as unique commodities organized around the particular brands of individual sensibilities. What then comes to occupy the missing second-order desire and teleology in Lawrence’s scheme is of course the art market; it is not surprising then that a third of the book is devoted to why and how the new artist should enter and sustain herself with the extant art world. One might think that what makes Saltz’s current persona as ‘America’s best known art critic’ and a social media influencer so dispiriting is not just the open desperation of his desire for mediated attention, with his shenanigans and posting of images of genitalia, nor his over-heated prose style of proclaiming this or that artist a genius to whom one should kneel, and this or that other artist fraud to be scorned. No, what is most dispiriting is his profound, irremediable conformism.
References:
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Art and Morality’ (1925) in Phoenix (1936)
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)
-----Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
Jerry Saltz, How to Be an Artist (2020)
--Seeing Out Loud (2003)
--Seeing Out Louder (2009)