While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement - movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship.
Jerry SaltzAbstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
Jerry SaltzOf course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
Jerry SaltzChris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.
Jerry Saltz