Jerry Saltz

Jerry Saltz

Jerry Saltz grabbing his head
"How To Be an Artist; or at Least Think More Freely and Creatively About Your Everyday Life"

Oct. 28, 2019 | 6 p.m. | 3502 Knauss Hall, WMU

Art is for anyone; it's just not for everyone. Andy Warhol once said art is allowing 鈥渢he little things to suddenly thrill you.鈥 How do you get from there to making real art, great art? Everyone takes a different path. Yet over the years I鈥檝e found myself returning to a handful of core ideas again and again. Art, in all its forms, raises many persistent, strange, even scary issues鈥攃hallenges that can keep artists and onlookers intimidated, cynical, afraid to get started or keep going. Even lifers like me. Some of the fears that block us are circumstantial: What happens if you didn鈥檛 go to school for this? (I didn鈥檛.) What if you鈥檙e almost pathologically bashful? (Hi.) What if you have Imposter Syndrome? (Almost everyone does; it鈥檚 the price of admission to the House of Creativity.)

Book cover: Seeing Out Louder, Art Criticism 2003-2009, Jerry Saltz
Come listen, come learn, come and maybe change your life some. Or at least peer into the mysteries of art. What allowed Bob Dylan to observe that writing a song makes him feel like 鈥淚t鈥檚 like a ghost is writing ... except the ghost picked me to write the song.鈥 Jerry Saltz will help you tap into this, trust it, and not get creeped out of it.

In 2018, Saltz received a Pulitzer prize for Criticism 鈥渇or a robust body of work that conveyed a canny and often daring perspective on visual art in America, encompassing the personal, the political, the pure and the profane.鈥 Currently, Saltz is the senior art critic at New York Magazine and its entertainment site Vulture.com, a leading voice in the art world at large. He won a National Magazine Award for Columns & Commentary in 2015, and was a finalist for the same award in 2011.

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