Back in December, I asked Jerry Saltz, our longtime, Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic, to sift through a mythical collection I kept hearing about of thousands of photographs he had taken of the New York art world throughout the 1990s. Jerry, who had turned the pictures into slides and then stored them away in his basement, was at first reluctant to reminisce. “I was a terrible photographer and always stood so, so far away from everything. I got bupkes,” he told me. But he committed to the exercise and returned to the office for show-and-tell. The slideshow he presented, edited down from some 40,000 slides, was gobsmacking, a rollicking romp through the decade led by a docent who is half–Jeff Koons, half–Zero Mostel. His affection for the decade that made him an art critic was infectious, not just for those who remember that Elizabeth Peyton show at the Chelsea hotel or Rirkrit Tiravanija’s cookouts at 303 Gallery but for younger colleagues who had never even seen a slide projector.
It was a natural anchor for our annual “Yesteryear” issue, where we also painstakingly assembled the personal photo albums of two other greats, the gallerist Paula Cooper and the graffiti artist Lee Quiñones. Taken together, these images make up a scrapbook of the art world as we would like to remember it, rambunctious and pure, when it was just, as Jerry puts it, “our village of pirates and dirty shamans.” The writer/director G. Anthony Svatek has made a short film of Jerry’s slideshow, but New York subscribers have a chance to see it in its original form (if you haven’t received an invitation already, write to subscriberevents@nymag.com. If you are not a subscriber yet, sign up here). Join us at the SVA Theatre at 6 p.m. on May 4. It will be more fun than the Met Gala. I promise.
—Erik Maza, editor-at-large, New York
