ARTSTAR

Jerry Saltz, artStar

1 year ago

"My Jerry Saltz Problem" by James Panero

An astounding piece of analysis on the Jerry Saltz “artStar” phenomenon.. A must-read for anyone at all interested in how the internet is currently contributing to the de-materialization of art, facilitated by scum hack sell-outs like Saltz, who distort and debase art and promote its devaluation dimensionally across me.dia, while benefiting personally in the SUCK art topology. In the final analysis for this blog, the internet era art star is not an artist, but a critic, who leverages his access to every platform of public and private art exchange [auction, art fair, print media, television, studios, galleries, social media, collector’s homes, museums, art funders, institutions, schools, etc.] into a Ponzi scheme framework of amplified importance for his own ideas and experience. This has nothing in truth to do with art. Phenomenologically, Saltz’s trajectory only has to do with translating vertical hierarchies to proprietary “cloud” effects of instrumental benefit to a fractional constituency of interdependent players. Panero’s essay correctly diagnoses the topology and the effects, and provides the only viable response to the Saltz Effect. A critic art star is the hero of 3000 years of epistemology sutured into the dimensional realities of the post-Turing machine era. Saltz is not only a practitioner of interventions [recall Jerry’s recent memorable disclosures: Turning off the Rist projections with a button-push and making the relational aesthetic installation at Guggenheim cry], he - as the new SUCK art star, eclipsing the Hirsts and Deitches, and even Broads or Rockefellers, at least immaterially - is intervention himself. Saltz’s faceted “identity” allows him to defend the abominable and despicable status quo of “art” as a secondary commodities market, and attack it, to create a persona that is “the friend of artists” while performing actions that are destructive to art and artist, contribute to the neo-establishment of a demonstrably fundamentalist schema for art in society while pretending to promote “openness” and “inclusion” in the HR dynamics of art-org behavior, and so on. To acknowledge that Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith are indistinguishable structurally from the corrupt and oppressive two-party system currently dominant in American politics is important for anyone who cares about art and artist. Whether one encounters a byte of Saltz flotsam in a reblog on an artist site, or meets him as I have at an art fair magazine table, one must parse the encounter as an episode, since to “contact” Jerry Saltz, a cloud brand essentially, is to confront the unreal reality he projects today through the media octopus - equivalent to Goldman Sachs in its formulation, if not its apps and mechanisms. The devastation attaching to both Goldman Sachs and Jerry Saltz, while dissimilar in features, is however effectively identical. Both entities function as managers, as management, as specialists who derive benefit from playing both sides against the middle for profits. Jerry Saltz’s profits are not necessarily monetary, which can also be said to be true of Goldman Sachs. Social positioning is a profound driver of amorality. To recognize distortion tactics, obfuscation, as a key feature of the multi-platform operation in a mediated topology is necessary to comprehend the effects of distortion, whose ancillary effects include reverb and echo. Saltz has emerged as an accomplished operator in this sense, which contextualizes him with the BP, US Chamber of Commerce, Goldman Sachs, Toyota, SONY, and other manipulators of free speech environments and enemies of bottom-top representation. It is only necessary to scope the products promoted by such entities, to datamine their trajectories, to analyze their artificiality as manifested situationally, to gain a measure of the impacts for which they can be held to account. Jerry Saltz has been a critical voice at critical times over the past decade - a cloud presence in the affirmative role - in support of important hyper-destructive developments in the evolution of art in the nascent 4D era, and in the SUCK takeover of the art platform in America. I have documented most of these interventions in the various AFH blogs and my thesis in real time. To sum: Jerry Saltz is a fraud, a case study for corruption in the cultural infrastructure of America, AND as such, he is exactly the sort of collaborator who is the paradigmatic emblem of ArtStar Kultur. Corruption, oppression from the top-down have gone viral - and their artificial name is Saltz, and all who love art should shun his wickedness, for it shall besmirch them, and all creation, in the end. In times of the ascension of evil, it is good to notice who succeeds in the position of mouthpiece, fulminator, and humming blatherer. [MILO]

1 year ago

Appendix 1: Iron Checkbook Shapes Cultural Los Angeles

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

Published: February 7, 2010

LOS ANGELES — Every American city has its power brokers, but only Los Angeles has an Eli Broad.

Mr. Broad dominates the arts here with a force that has no parallel in any major city. Los Angeles would literally not look the same had Mr. Broad not chosen it as his home 40 years ago, and his business-focused method of managing his giving has earned him a reputation as both a genius and a despot.

Now, as his preferred pick, Jeffrey Deitch, prepares to take the helm of another cultural pillar of Los Angeles — the Museum of Contemporary Art, which Mr. Broad helped found three decades ago and recently bailed out with a $30 million grant — Mr. Broad’s grip on the city and its arts has never been tighter.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

1 year ago

CONTRACTOR [Stress Position]
1000 REVOLUTIONARY ACTIONS
Acrylic, ink, spray paint, digital print, die-cut foil [print inverse], screws, washers and copper on canvas
12” x 9”
©2010

2 years ago

Part 6

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PJM: Is that the last box, Milo?

MILO: No, but close enough. I’ll toss the rest on top. Let’s take a break and have a cuppa.

PJM: Sounds good.

PJM: So, what’ll you do?

MILO: Same as last time. Head to the mountains.

PJM: Any sage advice?

MILO: Zeelio was right, when he said, “Remember poetry.” Even in wartime, the humanity of the fighter must be spared. I once believed that the empty vessel, the void container, was the perfect form. While I think that may be so for a young man, I no longer adhere to that visualization as an elder.

PJM: What are the parameters now?

MILO: If there is any hope at all to avoid cataclysm, it will take shape as an examination of arrogance and artificiality, and the concept of property, but you know this already.

PJM: The focal areas will be the electric grid, the concentration of immense destructive force at the point of the individual, the security of the compound, and the interoperability of systems.

MILO: In other words, your predictions are proving accurate.

PJM: Corporate-generated information is now completely untrustworthy. The duly elected democratic government, of, by and for the people has been eradicated. The availability of sustainable food and water sources for the current human population has been requisitioned. It is only a matter of time at this point.

MILO: What of art?

PJM: I suppose art will survive, just as humanity will - in some unpredictable iteration.

MILO: Do you feel up to reflecting on the sequence or precursor to the status quo?

PJM: Not really. It’s survival time. We must think of the women and children. We can leave vengeance and justice to the young and hardy headbangers. The world can hardly imagine their capacities for reckoning. The best among them are only waiting for the permission of God, a trusted leader, or maybe the right combination of song lyrics, meth and firepower. Or the right camera.

MILO: Cormac’s Blood Meridian, a vision of flames and dancing marauders, Goya and Auschwitz, a butcher’s paradise, at least for a short while.

PJM: Zeelio wondered aloud when last I saw him whether Haiti might be a final warning. Me, I spent yesterday evening switching dimensionally from painting my most articulate formal piece ever, to The Cruise and Speed Levitch’s beautiful musings, and the NFL Conference Championships, to Lula’s chile, soup and cookies, and so on.

MILO: Obviously, you didn’t travel to LA for the art fair.

PJM: No. The selection of galleries was a third smaller than last year’s. More at issue were the continuing observances of blood protocols. My engagements will be limited for another set of seasons, and all to the better. Between now and 2011/-2, we have much to do. I only pray the moorings hold.

MILO: Still, I wish we could have discussed more the new topologies of speech and artificial speech, art and artificial art, persons and artificial people. I very much would have loved for our collective to have delved more thoroughly into the burgeoning fracture of property-ness.

PJM: The land will shrug off the chains binding it, just as Rudy said she would. Great suffering will attend the transitional phase. Zeelio’s Haiti assertion seems correct, given the horrible history of that people, in the aftermath of their shedding the coils of slavery. As Speed suggested in his post-9/11 commentary, an opportunity for considered change and even directional, sustainable growth - the abandonment of the thrusting tower of monetary power - is yet attainable. At least for a moment longer.

MILO: I love Timothy’s multiple-layered Flower discourse, as captured in those moving images.

PJM: Jeffrey Deitch will get to LA in time for the earthquake. As for MoCA…

MILO: …Eli Broad…

PJM: …The art business…

MILO: What will we care about these things, as we hunt for the evening meal, among the craggy stones and in the dry stream beds?

PJM: If we are wrong, more’s the better!

MILO: We’ll be fools growing fat in the desert with our friends and lovers, at home again and hardy.

PJM: We’ll be making children, like there’s no tomorrow, and art as though yesterday is gone!

MILO: Our songs will echo in the ravines, until nothing is heard anymore. I’ll paint your face blue.

PJM: I’ll paint yours red, and we’ll pretend we’re tracking the last soda on the planet, on our way to Crawford.

[The End]

2 years ago

What a surprise > Jerry Saltz: ARTSTAR DEATH PANELIST

CREDIT: Artnet News

Jan. 19, 2010

REALITY TV MEETS CONTEMPORARY ART
Is the contemporary art scene truly ready for its “Project Runway” moment? Because it’s on the horizon, as the Bravo cable network prepares to air Sarah Jessica Parker’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” beginning in June 2010. It seems quite likely that the wide television exposure — the show is scheduled for 14 episodes, with many repeats, if it is a success — will make stars out of its art-world participants, some of whom already show up occasionally on PatrickMcMullan.com. Playing emcee (the Tim Gunn role) is suave Swiss auctioneer Simon de Pury, who co-hosts with China Chow (the Heidi Klumm role), a glamorous model and sometime actress.

The panel of three judges includes former BlackBook mag editor Bill Powers, who now directs the Half Gallery on Forsyth Street in Manhattan (and who is married to designer Cynthia Rowley), the elegant power-dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn (who operates Salon 94 gallery at two locations, on East 94th and Freeman’s Alley) and New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz (who also publishes in these pages, of course). “The Next Great Artist” starts with 14 artists, who are said to be a varied bunch, men and women of assorted disciplines, including at least one photographer and one architect, ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s. The artists are each given a work space in one large studio, and in each episode face a specific challenge, with the three judges eliminating one contestant every week.

Is there any crying, as on Tyra Banks’ mean “America’s Top Model”? Surely there’s some nudity; what is bohemia without nudes? Bravo is keeping mum on these and other questions, including the exact nature of the weekly challenges, though insiders suggest that they’re nothing out of the ordinary: do a portrait or corporate commission, say, or make a work for something like the upcoming “Haunted” show at the Guggenheim Museum. Filming for the series is just about done, and the winner, according to Bravo, receives not only an unspecified cash prize, but also an exhibition at “a nationally recognized museum.” This we’ve got to see.