New York magazine’s senior art critic, Jerry Saltz, has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His winning article was “My Life as a Failed Artist,” an essay published last April about his failure at being an artist, the disappointment that came with it, and how it ultimately turned him into a critic.
In an awards ceremony held recently at Columbia University in New York, Dana Canedy, the administrator of the Pulitzers, called Saltz’s reviews and essays “a robust body of work that conveyed a canny and often endearing perspective on visual arts in America encompassing the personal, the political, the pure, and the profane.”
Saltz has been with New York since 2007. Prior to that, from 1998 to 2007, he was senior art critic at the Village Voice. His pithy, stylish reviews, essays, and columns for both publications, as well as his outspoken presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, have turned him into one of today’s most widely read art critics.
In addition to those publications, Saltz has also contributed to Art in America, Modern Painters, Parkett, Time Out New York, Flash Art, and Arts Magazine. He was the adviser for the 1995 Whitney Biennial and a judge on the short-lived Bravo reality television show “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” His reviews and essays have been compiled into books, including “Seeing Out Loud: The Village Voice Art Columns.”