ART IS LIFE

How artists respond to and influence our world.

In this follow-up to How To Be an Artist, Saltz, senior art critic for New York magazine, celebrates the works of several dozen artists, most of whose careers fall within the last half-century. The author also offers extended reflections on the commercial dynamics of the art world and his own career as an artist and critic. The book, which includes many of his previously published writings from the late 1990s until the present, is divided into sections based on three recent watershed moments in American history—9/11 and the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump—and their intersections with the art world. Saltz consistently frames his consideration of particular artists in relation to these events or the broader political climate they helped form, and he makes a persuasive case that we might profitably interpret contemporary history through—and find profound consolation and spiritual guidance in—the creations of gifted visual artists. Among the artists the author champions are prominent figures such as Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Willem de Kooning as well as lesser-known ones such as David Wojnarowicz, Laurel Nakadate, Dana Schutz, Katherine Bernhardt, and Joseph E. Yoakum. Saltz is particularly attentive to those artists who are “revisiting and reinventing cultural norms enforced by five hundred years of colonialism,” and he provides trenchant commentary on the racial and gender politics of the contemporary art world. At his best, his discussions of individual works are informed, illuminating, and accessible, as in his lengthy treatment of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and its enduring aesthetic power. Saltz also covers an assortment of related topics, including the politics of auction culture, the paintings of George W. Bush, the cave drawings at Niaux, and the evolving censorship practices of Facebook and Instagram.

A sweeping survey and fervent defense of the value of art in modern life.