By David Malcolm Rose
“Art is the greatest tool mankind has ever developed to view the human spirit.” Jerry Saltz.
Saltz is an art critic. I think I just saw your eyes glaze over. I know mine did. Saltz, who won a Pulitzer for his work, came to the craft in an unorthodox way. He began not in art school but as a long-distance truck driver.
His approach is refreshing as he doesn’t use Art-speak. I don’t either, at least not anymore. Back when I was in art school, talking the talk was far more important than walking the walk. I had to try and master that lexicon.
I struggled until a friend took me out to the livestock barn at the state fair to see the hog judging. A wrangler would trot a hog into the ring, and the announcer would talk about that pig like it was the Marilyn Monroe of swine. The next hog was the Jayne Mansfield of the porcine world. I realized that by tweaking that flowery language and substituting obscure multi-syllable words for simple ones, I could at least fake Art-speak.
Still, it was difficult for me to understand what was written in the more pretentious art magazines. Truth be told, I could only understand about half of what I was saying myself. The parts of those magazines that were understandable to me seemed to be suggesting that the stuff I was making wasn’t worth a hill of beans.
That left only two choices for me: I could either quit making the art that my inner self, my spirit, was telling me to make, or I could quit reading art criticism. I took the easier path and quit reading that pompous drivel.
David Rose shows his art at Collective Arts Gallery, upstairs at 620 Central Avenue, in downtown Hot Springs.
