The Chicago origin — and breakdown — of Jerry Saltz, the everyman’s art critic

Decades before he became arguably the most important art critic in America, long ago when print was king and being the most important art critic in America meant having the gravitas to influence the direction of the art world itself, Jerry Saltz vowed to stand outside of the art world looking in. Being from Chicago helped. Having a minuscule studio near the Red Line in the Loop helped. Meeting outsider Chicago artists like Joseph Yoakum and Lee Godie, and having grown up without much art at all, helped. Becoming a self-taught artist, and showing more affinity early on for the ancient art in the Field Museum than the celebrated art movements splashed across the Art Institute, that helped, too. As Saltz would write many years later, he loved that the Field was full of art removed from the burdens and judgments of the art world.

He figured himself “an outsider worm in the bowels of the insider hyena.”

Then he lost his nerve.

He owned a small Chicago gallery, and developed his own promising art practice; he worked with Rhona Hoffman and received a hefty grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and got reviewed in Artforum.

But he couldn’t hack it.

So, of course, he took a job as a long-distance truck driver. His CB radio handle was “The Jewish Cowboy” and he would sign on every day with “Shalom, partner!” He figures he has seen every place in the United States within a hundred yards of the highway interstate system. He did this for years — fuming all the while, nursing a Chicago-ish inferiority complex, resentful about the art world he ran from.

So, of course, he decided to be a critic. He had never written, but he figured writing about art was still easier than making it. Decades later, as senior art critic for New York magazine, he would win a Pulitzer for criticism in 2018. His new collection, “Art Is Life,” draws on his past 20 years of writing, and when he returns to his hometown Saturday for the Chicago Humanities Festival, Saltz returns as the closest thing we have now to a widely known art critic.

Yet, as he sees it, he’s still on the outside.

“Creative people always feel like they are outsiders,” Saltz said the other day, from New York City. “In many ways, all artists have always been outsiders. They are smelly shamans on the edge of the village who make things and are convinced they will make the world better and heal people, then have to convince other people these useless things will make the world better. Turns out, art does make the world better. Coming from Chicago meant (art-wise) we were definitely playing second fiddle to New York and the art happening there. But in all honestly, me and the artists I knew in Chicago in the 1970s thought we were the (expletive). Yet you make work out of your failings. But it leaves you thinking at three in the morning: I don’t know what I am doing, I don’t know history, I don’t know how to write, my ankles are too fat. Doubt is the price of admission to the house of creativity. Without doubt there’s no faith, and faith without doubt is certainty and not faith at all. My insecurities likely came from family but to feel (like an outsider) is an existential condition.”

He talks this way.

All of it is sort hard to buy, but all of it is also sort of true. Saltz’s writing — and “Art is Life” is a near-perfect summary of a singularly critical voice — is as outside as an insider with the ear of an entire industry can get. It doesn’t make friends with artists or museums or curators and is free of the bloodless, stone-faced art speak that pollutes art schools, the labels on museum walls and contemporary criticism. No artist “activates” their gallery space or “interrogates late-capitalist structure” in his columns. He avoids dogmatic declarations (“Painting is dead!”) and scorched-earth definitiveness. But most importantly, despite writing about a medium that tends more toward solemn nods than squeals of excitement, Jerry Saltz can be very fun to read.

A visit with Paleolithic paintings in France is dubbed his “come-to-cave-art moment.” Barack Obama, standing in his official portrait by Kehinde Wiley, looks “open to his surroundings, part of them but not the only thing present.” Proposed models for a 9/11 memorial “resemble waiting rooms, food courts, corporate parks, underground malls, or airport architecture.” He admits: “If I stumbled on three or four of (George W.) Bush’s paintings in a flea market, with no name attached, I’d snap them up.” He writes about “the edge of something primitive” in an Alice Neel painting and the “avenging angel” in the historical silhouettes of Kara Walker. Many of the essay titles alone in “Art is Life” speak to Saltz’s approachability: “Is There Great Art on Instagram?” “Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?”, “The Painting I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Kerry James Marshall”, “RIP Thomas Kinkade”, “What the Hell was Modernism?”

Though associated for decades with East Coast journalism, Saltz also fits neatly into the history of smart, egalitarian arts criticism born in Chicago, from Siskel and Ebert, to Margo Jefferson, to Chicago cultural vanguard Paul B. Moses (himself the subject of a new exhibit at University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library).

His background isn’t dull, either.

He grew up mostly in River Forest and attended Oak Park and River Forest High School (“graduating at the very bottom of my class”). His family moved there from “a crappy apartment” near 72nd Street on the South Side. His father, an inventor, had created the Dexter Sewing Machine (“like a little stapler with a needle and thread and spool and you squeezed and sewed on buttons”) then sold it on late-night TV, Veg-O-Matic-like. They got rich and bought a large house in the suburbs and had a housekeeper. When Saltz was 10 years old, his mother jumped out of a three-story window and killed herself. “She was never spoken of again in the house. I wasn’t sad. I went to school the next day. There was no funeral. Only later did I learn it was a suicide. My father remarried, a Polish working-class woman with two sons, one of which was my age who taught me the dark side of life. The first night together we snuck out and stole street signs and got caught. That house was always chaos. No meals were made for us. The housekeeper made vats of food and we ate on our own. We had our own doorways and dining room and no interaction with parents. I had to get out.”

The night he graduated high school he moved to Chicago and never returned home.

He dropped out of the School of the Art Institute and worked as a security guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and despite seeming aimless, he become “somewhat successful” at art in Chicago. Until he received his NEA grant and he moved to New York and in a crisis of confidence, he imploded. “I never had to be hospitalized but I had what I called a walking nervous breakdown.” He spent hours alone in the truck, going cross country, raging that no one knew how great he was, certain he was right.

“At the same time, what did I learn out there, driving all that time? (Expletive) nothing,” he said. “I was only seeing myself, and I never left myself. I got so miserable in those trucks, anything had to be better, but I had no degrees and I was about 40 years old and I figured if I was an art critic I could meet women. I could make money, which is ridiculous. I could get famous, which is nuts. I taught myself to write by reading Artforum, but I taught myself to write how they wrote. Which was jargon. I would write about the late commodified object of the post-capitalistic simulacrum finding a liminal space of a haptic moment. I wrote that (expletive)! People said it was so smart! But because deadlines are sent from hell via heaven, one day, on deadline, while procrastinating, I didn’t have time to lie or write jargon and I wrote what I really thought. That meant writing what I think works and what didn’t and why. That clearly. I knew who critics were but I was not doing a lot of reading at first. I liked (critic) Gary Indiana. And I knew my wife’s name, (New York Times art critic) Roberta Smith, but I doubt I ever read her. I was making it up as I went. I would watch Sister Wendy, that nun who had an art history show on TV, and I would think that I wanted to make art accessible like that. I don’t think there is anything wrong with art talk — it’s made many a liberation movement — but I don’t understand it.”

It all took a while.

He didn’t become art critic of The Village Voice until 1998 (taking his wife’s old job), then moved to New York magazine in 2006. He’s 71 now. He’s sick of “the idea of progress” in art, but says “we are also living in the most extraordinary positive rewriting of art history” — which is the subtext of his new book. “All the old (art world) ideas were not worthless but they also contained a hierarchy and now museums are rehanging walls. Underrepresented artists get to be mediocre! Most people who didn’t have what I had by being male and white would have never had the second, third, fourth chances I got. Eventually, class will be addressed, too.”

New York remains, of course, the world’s art broker, but not, Saltz said, its creative center.

He never wanted to leave Chicago, he said. “The city celebrates eccentrics and outsiders. I was very proud of being from Chicago. If I was going to make it I felt I had to take a chance and leave, but my metaphysical self never left. In the 1970s (Chicago) was behind New York in art. That’s not so true anymore. Everyone can see everything at the same time now. But then all of this feeling about Chicago — that took me 13 years or so to recognize. This gigantic treasure house I have is the voice of Chicago. Bad weather, bad manners, the worst accent in the country. I failed to appreciate my superpower and that was coming out from Chicago.”

“Jerry Saltz: Art Is Life” is 10:30 a.m. Nov. 5 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave. as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival; $20 at www.chicagohumanities.org

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com