POSTPONED! How to Be an Artist

As one of the world’s most widely read art critics, recipient of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, and near-deity to a cult online following of one million followers across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, Jerry Saltz’s influence is unmatched.

Beginning his career at The Village Voice in 1998, Mr. Saltz has been enlivening the pages of New York magazine with his patently cheeky and accessible style for over a decade. As the Pulitzer committee noted, he was recognized “for a robust body of work that conveys a canny and often daring perspective on visual art in America, encompassing the personal, the political, the pure and the profane.” He has been awarded three honorary doctorates for his contributions to arts and culture.

Born out of a New York cover story title “How to Be an Artist” that was seen by over 600,000 readers, his new book, How to Be an Artist, emerges “in a time when it seems like there are so many more artists, museums, and galleries than ever; when art seems constantly in the news; when platforms like lnstagram are conditioning us all to think visually … and questions about creativity are in the air.” A college dropout who worked as a long-haul truck driver and didn’t write his first piece of criticism until the age of thirty-eight, he is uniquely suited to communicate the wonders of creativity and imagination.

With How to Be an Artist, Mr. Saltz offers irreverent wisdom, pragmatic guidance, contributions from art-world legends, and explications of historic masterworks. Within this lively treatise, he demands that you “OWN YOUR GUILTY PLEASURES” and “USE YOUR STUDIO” (i.e., your “inventor’s laboratory, teenager’s bedroom, mechanic’s garage, seance chamber, fortress of solitude … and launch pad”), engaging visual artists, performers, businesspeople, athletes — simply put, any reader who thinks their life could use a little bit more invention.

Mr. Saltz is the senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture. In addition to his Pulitzer, he is the recipient of a 2019 National Magazine Award. Mr. Saltz was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize during his tenure at The Village Voice. He has starred in numerous entertaining, accessible, viral videos (for New York, Vice, and others) aimed at demystifying the art world. A frequent guest lecturer, he has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others. He has appeared at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia universities, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere.