Jerry Saltz

Jerry Saltz

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 “the little things to suddenly thrill you.” How do you get from there to making real art, great art? Everyone takes a different path. Yet over the years I’ve found myself returning to a handful of core ideas again and again. Art, in all its forms, raises many persistent, strange, even scary issues—challenges 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’t go to school for this? (I didn’t.) What if you’re almost pathologically bashful? (Hi.) What if you have Imposter Syndrome? (Almost everyone does; it’s the price of admission to the House of Creativity.)

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 “It’s like a ghost is writing ... except the ghost picked me to write the song.” 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 “for 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.” 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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All University Center for the Humanities events are free and open to the public. No tickets required.

Free parking in parking structure #2 adjacent to Miller Auditorium.