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Maybe someday
26
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
41/100Critics
10/100Scholars
Author:
Jerry Saltz
Publisher:
Riverhead Books
Date:
March 17, 2020
Art has the power to change our lives. For many, becoming an artist is a lifelong dream. But how to make it happen? In How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, one of the art worldâs most celebrated and passionate voices, offers an indispensable handbook for creative people of all kinds.
What The Reviewers Say
In these pages, artists emerge as beings who ‘hate to be asked what their work means’, ‘led by something outside’ themselves, ‘material poets’, with the imagination as a ‘creed’. There is something of the post-Vasari myth of the tortured artist-philosopher in these descriptions, and a note of adulation that veers close to reverence.
That budding Giorgio Morandi will be disappointed to find nothing from Saltz on how to stretch a canvas or what the correct proportions of oil medium to pigment should be. They will, however, discover a surprising amount of solid advice.
Though the book presents plenty of threads to follow if the reader wants to go deeper, it doesn’t fully connect the activities of the artist with their roots in art history or conceptual innovation.
Senior art critic at New York Magazine and winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, Saltz...became a writer only after a decadeslong battle with 'demons who preached defeat.' Hoping to spare others the struggle that he experienced, he offers ebullient, practical, and wise counsel.
