Jerry Saltz's gloomy predictions: the art world as it is today will end and so many will not survive

For art critic Jerry Saltz, one of the most highly regarded on the scene, the art world as we have known it so far will suffer devastating effects due to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, and many will not survive. He wrote this in his most recent article, published last April 2 in Vulture, the newspaper with which the U.S.-based author has long collaborated, and titled The Last Days of the Art World...and Probably the First Days of the New One.

Yet, Saltz himself admits, until recently he himself had remained optimistic: that we were facing the end of the art world as we had known it seemed sensationalistic and untrue. “I have always seen the art world go through episodes like the current one: not pandemics, of course, but contractions due to crises of a different kind, which have formed, not destroyed, the community I love,” Saltz writes. “I come from an era,” he pointed out, “that saw the last years of a smaller, non-professional, non-monetized art world, and where there were no such things as stable careers, sales, art fairs, large audiences, auctions. That world was based on the desires and passion of quasi-outlaws, wanderers, slackers, visionaries, pimps, geniuses, social climbers, exiles, gypsies, aristocratic bohemians. That world then grew and became big, hyperactive, circus-like, unbalanced upward, and professional, and all topped off with obscene amounts of money, and concentrated in the hands of 1,500 lucky people, mostly of white complexion.”

“I have always chosen to see the art world (even when it began to follow corporate logic),” Saltz continues, “in that spirit, frustrated by those strange compromises with money that we have all come to, but sure that, deep down, artists were still quasi-laughers and slackers.” Saltz says this optimism always led him to think that the art world would survive anything. “But last week, that optimism began to die,” Saltz recounts. “Even a devoted art lover like me has to admit that the infrastructure that holds the art world is already in the balance. Some parts may already be gone even now.” There will “certainly be galleries, museums and artists working, of course. But I’m concerned that this division will only exacerbate the inequalities that increasingly dominate this world, with mega-galleries and art stars surviving, and with the furrow between them and everyone else widening and making the most scrappy artists and galleries ever closer to invisibility.”

For Saltz, “a lot will depend on how long this lasts. And although South Korea is already getting back to work and some are reporting things back to normal, the fact that America has failed to respond to the coronavirus crisis suggests that our shutdown will last for a while. Chef David Chang estimates that 90 percent of restaurants will not reopen when it’s all over, and he speculates that the food world will return to the 1990s, which was before the era when diversity came to the industry. If restaurants are too fragile not to fail, the art world, which is much, much smaller and much more fragile, will experience terrible losses.”

In the art world, Saltz points out, “things were already difficult,” between galleries forced to incur very high costs (e.g., those to participate in fairs, exhibitions and biennials), so many artists often leaving small galleries for “mega-galleries,” lack of liquidity. “Most galleries,” the critic is convinced, “are not very well prepared. And these galleries will close. Many workers have already been laid off,” and if there are no economic measures to help the art world, “the 90 percent assumed by Chang will also be galleries that will close, and galleries are the first delivery vehicle for contemporary art.” Galleries will then be followed by academies, which will become “too expensive” and will have to struggle with the lack of jobs in the sector. The pandemic, according to Saltz, will also be the end for art fairs, “except Art Basel, which has its own venue in Switzerland, and maybe Frieze, because the British love big, flashy, theatrical productions.”

As for those who write about art, Saltz’s predictions are bleak here as well: “magazines and blogs depend on advertising, but what will advertising promote? Are galleries still paying contracts with newspapers to promote exhibitions that won’t happen?” According to Saltz, magazines may no longer be able to pay people who write for them, but the crisis could affect the smaller ones as well, because while they don’t have to pay salaries they will still see reduced revenue. “At the moment, blogs and galleries publish a steamy cloud of lists of art that can be seen online and try to organize virtual screenings and other things that can be done while incarcerated. These things keep spirits up, but in the vast majority of cases they don’t bring in money.”

As for museums, many have already initiated layoffs. As for artists, however, Saltz is convinced that “obviously art will go on, and it goes without saying, because art is something bigger and deeper than the business that supports it. Art will only disappear when all the problems that art has to explore have been explored.” Viruses do not kill art, Saltz points out, and creativity was already with us since caveman times, but there is one troubling detail nonetheless. “In the last decade,” Saltz says, “the art world has lost the ability to adapt. Or, rather, so far it seems to have had only one chance to adapt, regardless of circumstances: that of growing bigger and busier.” But this will not be the answer to the current climate: the only possible response, according to Saltz, will therefore be to “adapt to change without giving in to old, unfashionable, petty or inapplicable dogmas.” The conclusion, “I don’t know how long this interregnum period will last. But the survivors will be able to rely on the knowledge gained from what they have learned about themselves by the time the angel of death has walked over us.”

Pictured: a moment from a past edition of Art Basel

Jerry Saltz's gloomy predictions: the art world as it is today will end and so many will not survive

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