Someone Let Me Know When Jerry Saltz Finds His Missing Gonads

Poor dude.

John Currin, Sunflower, 2021. Photo: © John Currin. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.

Jerry Saltz is the most recognized art critic in the U.S.; he works hard for it. His compulsive self-promotion is legendary at this point. It’s sort of entertaining, if a bit much. But we get it: the job of a full-time, paid culture critic (for any legacy media) is so endangered as to be practically extinct. To stay relevant and “in the conversation,” this older white man needs to hustle, which I think is a real shame; Saltz is a deeply empathetic writer who has earned his spot. He writes for New York Magazine, which is now owned by a hyper-woke media company, Vox.

The Vox atmosphere at New York is palpable in what it publishes: the irreplaceable Andrew Sullivan was fired for his heterodox views; the magazine kept tearing Dave Chappelle a new asshole for The Closer long after other outlets had let it go. Last month it ran an overlong and indulgent personal essay by a trans writer of questionable mental stability about pursuing a full phalloplasty. A few days ago, one of its women critics ran a takedown of Aziz Ansari’s newest stand-up special, and what seems to have happened is that while she watched, she didn’t hear any of the comedian’s jokes—you sense she’s still punishing Ansari for a bad date he had with another woman years ago. The Vox/New York atmosphere echoes a very Brooklyn post-hipster state of mind. It’s all-in on identity politics.

But I generally admire Saltz’s writing. He’s good at letting you into his personal response to the work he’s covering in a way that doesn’t undermine his formal points. It is charismatic writing, which is in short supply when it comes to art criticism, so he’s somewhat an art critic “for the people.” This is a noble position to take in an intellectual sphere otherwise forged from stultifying academic writing and thinking. He’s accessible.

Recently, Saltz wrote about John Currin’s latest solo show at Gagosian in New York. At first, I was surprised but happy to see this. Currin and his work, in 2021 (when the show opened) is pretty much everything that explodes the brains of the Vox set: he’s a middle-aged, very straight white guy who sometimes paints naked women in a style that’s now hopelessly linked to the Dead White European Canon (now verboten), and he makes millions of dollars doing it.  He’s extremely gifted, and yet most major museums treat his work like it’s a third rail. They rarely show it.

Saltz got something very wrong in his review. Something some readers wouldn’t have even caught, given that so much of this 2000-word, non-exegesis is dedicated to Saltz’s own self-flagellation for writing about Currin’s work at all. His mistake is two-fold.

The first part of it is his and his wife Roberta Smith’s (she’s head art critic for the New York Times) shared, almost comical blindness to the conceptual underpinnings of the figurative work of certain artists. They assume that anything conceptual should be expressed in all-new ways; that an artist communicating anything fresh has to completely reinvent the wheel, rather than buckling an existing one. Ironically, when they expect it of painters, they are, at this point, just asking for more of the same we’ve been getting out of New York painters for decades. They want hand; they want gesture. Guston. Saltz wants Dana Schutz. But it’s all convention now.

In that sense, they can both really miss the point.

The second part of his mistake is buried in this very misreading: Saltz seems to mistrust himself for deciding to write about these paintings, and thus feels the need to lob at least one “if only he did this instead” grenade into the conversation. In the review, Saltz is thoroughly antagonized by Currin’s worldview. He deals with it by writing that he wishes Currin would paint it in another style; he wishes that Currin would come up with a new painting language to tell his sordid stories.

He’s asking to Currin to no longer be Currin.

What the hell? You cannot separate the form from the content. The content is locked into the form. The from embodies the content. This is basic, basic stuff. This is Art 101.

As I was hacking through Saltz’s unusually dense rationalizing—qualifying—of the very existence of these paintings (and qualifying of his own review), I stopped short at his prescriptive paragraph; it’s near the end. I may have even gasped. (Such is the inside-baseball nature of critics who are invested.)

Currin is the best painter of his generation, and therefore one of the best artists alive. This is not due to his spectacular material skill—something he’s studied long and hard and bled for all along. Plenty of artists, if they had Currin’s intelligence and work ethic, could teach themselves to paint this way.

But that’s not the point. Currin’s work is conceptual. Currin is of course enamored with the paintings of the old masters (we all are; try denying Bruegel the Elder), but the point is that he’s painting, in this historicized way, things that are off—often in fact, way off of the familiar themes of renaissance, baroque, and realist painting. Those populating Currin’s paintings—men and women—are our distorted and absurd contemporaries. He skewers social politeness, he skewers men and woman, he skewers libido, suburbia, consumerism, and himself.

All of his satire is about his own milieu. He communicates a deep ambivalence about what we’re meant to dignify these days. He finds humor and pathos in all the hypocrisy.

His layered, varnished, baroque delivery ensures and locks in a psychic weight to his subjects, that in any other painting style would be read completely differently, if at all. His subject and style are inextricable. And the incredible luxury of them, these weird, fucked-up tableaus, is that they are delivered in a style we associate with the most lofty and leaden of art historical references.

How do you describe the physical specifics of inbred socialites without describing them as specifically as Velázquez would? A looser style would erase Currin’s specifics. The ironies in the paintings are in these specifics. Currin messes with the aristocracy of lineage. To do it right, he has to do it in a style dripping with aristocratic lineage.

The essence of this package—very weird and upsetting things painted as well as his forebears’ works—may be more salient than ever with his latest work: I didn’t fly to New York to see this show, but I’ve spent a lot of time with Currin’s paintings over the years. No doubt Saltz has, too.

The title of this post is clickbait. So was the title of Saltz’s Currin review. I like Saltz. But this kind of equivocation and apologia from him, this determination to assume Currin is hiding behind some smokescreen of material talent, is something I’m crediting to Saltz being mired in the claustrophobia of political correctness. He may return to us at full power after some of this cancel-culture shit has passed. I wish he had just not written this piece. I bet that in a few years, he’ll regret having published it. It is dripping with male self-hate. It was about appeasing his Vox overlords, his Brooklyn hipster following, and his own frightened and battered ego. Frankly, I think in his heart of hearts he profoundly admires these paintings, and knows what Currin is really getting at with them (and Currin’s subject here is indeed, even more than usual, fraught as hell. I read these paintings as a pretty devastating satire of the gender thing, and perhaps plastic surgery, and porn, i.e. privileged stuff), but Saltz knows he's not allowed to go there.

Saltz covered his own ass with this review though copious hand-wringing. Or he thought he did. Are we tired of this yet?

But it’s okay for Currin in the long run, I guess, because I’m sure every one of those paintings sold, privately, for boatloads of money. Congrats to Currin on his latest paintings, and congrats to the collectors who were smart enough to buy them.