Jerry Saltz, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for criticism, will start at New York in April, the New York Observer reports. Saltz joined the Voice in 1998. "Jerry is one of the city's most well-respected critics," Voice editor Tony Ortega says in a staff memo. "I know he'll continue doing outstanding work for his new editors just as he's done at the Voice for so long."
Voice art critic Jerry Saltz (pictured), dance critic Deborah Jowitt, and film critic J. Hoberman each took top honors in a poll of artists and industry insiders commissioned by Time Out New York and conducted by Samir Husni, chairman of the department of journalism at the University of Mississippi. Critics were rated in eight different categories; the Voice was the only New York publication to win three first-place awards.
Jerry Saltz knows it hurts to be criticized, but, he tells ArtsJournal.com, "If all criticism is enthusiastic it sells the art world short." He remembers after he wrote his first piece for the Voice, on Kara Walker's "painful, uneven show" at Wooster Gardens in 1998, he was terrified he'd be fired. A collection of his Village Voice reviews and essays, "Seeing Out Loud," has been published by The Figures press.
