Author: Jerry Saltz

Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist in love with art smitten with art history. You're also a woman with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world its ayatollah deliverer and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk Pop Art Jeff Koons Marcel Duchamp Francis Bacon and Catholicism.

These days newish art can be priced between $10000 and $25000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1200 they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.

Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity gizmos eating hanging out things that make noise – all are now the norm often edging out much else.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States it is arguably the finest anywhere.

Money is something that can be measured art is not. It's all subjective.

Contrary to popular opinion things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.

Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is can do or is worth on an existential alchemical level.