"My Anxiety" With Legendary Art Critic Jerry Saltz

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2:46And honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

3:21You know when you've read something and your heart stops and you just simply must talk about what you've read? I felt that when I read an article by the Pulitzer Prize winning art critic Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine. And trust me, even if you've never cared to read a piece of art criticism in your life, Jerry's piece, My Appetites, will get you there. Jerry wrote about his work, his anxiety, his trauma, the way he eats, and what he loves. He wrote it early during the coronavirus pandemic, deep in the midst of grief and fear and loneliness. And I started by asking him how he's doing since the piece came out.

3:57I am speaking to you in my 188th day of quarantine. I'm now in my office in lower Manhattan, New York City. My wife and I have spent almost that entire time pretty quarantined up in a rented house in Connecticut. But it's great to be back in New York. It's almost empty. Everything is quiet. Everything is clean. I've never seen the subway so clean. And I'm going to galleries and museums. It's really great to be back. Oh, that's so nice. You wrote this article, My Appetites, at the start of the pandemic, which, I mean, it kind of feels like that was yesterday, but also a century ago. And the article, it struck a nerve with so many people.

4:53Your premise of the article was food and your sort of weird habits, very almost strict but not rigid habits around food and all of the anxieties and complexities that go with your daily regimen. And, of course, food is such a way into our feelings in every way. But I was wondering if you think that your relationship with your food habits and how you manage them is really about anxiety or is it about something else? Well, this is exactly how that essay began, Maura. Right after we all went into quarantine in the Northeast, at least, my editor sent me an email that echoed a lot of comments I was getting on my social media where I'm very active.

5:52And all it said is, what are you eating? Exclamation point. And I thought, why is everyone asking me this? I asked him back and he said, well, and then I got into talking about what he was referring to, which is, I don't think I have any food issues until after writing this piece that I do not cook. My wife does not cook. I am a full-time art critic for New York Magazine. My wife is the co-chief art critic for New York Times. We don't have kids. I hate kids. She hates them. We're godmother and godfather to a lot of children, and I love them, and I give them money whenever I see them to make them like me.

6:43And what we do is see about 50 to 75 shows a week in New York. And then we come home and we both write. And we go to hell while writing. The hell part we'll get into. But the heaven is deciding not to worry about eating or cooking at all. And so what we do more, and I'm sorry to go on because I've been so quarantined, I'm just babbling. Talk. What we do is I go to a local like deli or grocery store and buy about 20 already grilled chicken breasts. I buy a bunch of broccoli and I steam it in one go. And I put all of that in the refrigerator. And what we eat for lunch is broccoli and chicken. And what we have for dinner is chicken and broccoli.

7:46That way, what we do is just get up, go over to the microwave, put the food in, sit together, eat, have a great time and go right back to work because all we want to do is work. But I didn't know those were food issues. Well, one of the things that you wrote about it is, I no longer know what is the pathology and which is the coping mechanism. So what did you mean by that? Well, the whole story goes back to being raised in a pretty dysfunctional family, maybe exactly like everybody and not anything like anybody else's, because each of us comes from the same story but different. When I was 10 years old, my mother killed herself.

8:39My father never told me that. All I knew was one day I came home from our temple Sunday school, and he said hello to me and my two younger brothers. I'm 10. We're in the rec room. We're sitting on a couch together, which is unusual for like right after Temple. And I noticed there's a lot of old people that I've never seen before milling around our living room upstairs. And he said, your mother has gone away. I said, where did she go? He said to the angels. I said, when will she be back again? And he said, she's not coming back. I then asked, what are we doing with her car? He looked at me funny, and that was it.

9:32There was no funeral, no mourning, no lying in Shiva, no nothing. She was never spoken about again for the rest of my life. The point being that I then kind of grew up on the other side of the law. There was my father later remarried Polish working class Catholic with two kind of gangster sons, one my own age. And I kind of grew up in an animal like household where we were. Right. You've written that no one taught you anything. They didn't teach you how to cook. They didn't teach you how to drive. It sounds like you kind of were feral in a way. I and my brothers were all feral. I never really spoke to them.

10:25They didn't speak to me. It was like Hobbesian, every kid for themselves. My parents had a belt made out of leather that hung on the fridge, and they would strap us if we did something wrong. I only grew angry, resentful. I felt pretty sorry for myself in this very large suburban home where everybody else seemed to have normal lives. And I thought, I've got this stupid life. But no, we were never taught anything. And as a result, there was no learning how to cook. We had a Polish housekeeper who made a big giant vat of what was called grub. It was put in the refrigerator and we would come down anytime we wanted just to eat.

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15:51That's$50 off your first year at Monarch.com with code achiever. When you were 10, you lost all control of your circumstances. Everything sounds like got extremely chaotic, extremely scary, extremely dangerous. Has anyone talked to you about the desire to control through food and to maintain a life that is free of things besides work as a reaction almost to the chaos you grew up in. Well, not really, Maura. I guess I went my own way. And I ended up never going to college because my parents never thought of, you know, bringing us around to colleges. I guess that's what kids did. or setting us up for the SATs, which I took and just filled out all in about 10 minutes and made a beautiful pattern, which I really loved, a beautiful geometric pattern out of my answers, and graduated at the bottom of my high school.

17:05But I graduated, and that night I moved into an apartment with some other friends in a rat hole in downtown Chicago, and I never went home again. I still have no college degree. I became a long distance truck driver. So when you talk to me about ideas of control and food, that for me, even though I wrote an essay that used that as the centerpiece, that's kind of the hole in the donut, so to speak, that that's so far down on the list that I think, well, I've really done well with food, in all honesty. Well, and you provide. I mean, the thing that was touching for me was having grown up with no models of caretaking, the way that you write about taking care of Roberta, your wife, is so dear and so touching.

18:01Well, Roberta was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2014. And I remember going inside of myself knowing that this is what I was facing, thinking, well, I've got to really, really man up, as it were. And I always decided that I would take care of her and cook for her from the beginning because she didn't cook. And I think her work is much better than mine. And I happen to love mine. So I'm not putting myself down. And I want her to work above all because I think she's one of the greatest art critics to ever live. Certainly the greatest alive right now. Blah, blah. I'm biased. And so I grew up around no women.

18:56And this really caused a problem for me that I had five brothers, a father, a stepmother for a while, and then she died. Not that I was aware of it. They never even told me that when that happened. But the point of all this, I think, is that somewhere in here, I learned to take care to get my work done, although it took me till I was 40 to become an art critic. I had never written a word in my life. I was in hell as a long-distance truck driver eating Kentucky fried chicken out of big barrels while I sat in the truck, totally isolated, yet in love with art. And whenever I came back to New York from these long-distance truck runs, the only Jewish truck driver, I might add, probably in the world.

19:57My handle was the Jewish cowboy. I used to come on and go, shalom, partner. And no one ever spoke to me. They didn't think it was funny? No one liked it? No. I thought I was being pretty funny. And the truckers spoke to each other all day and all night on this goddamn thing. And then I would come on finally and try to say something, and they all went silent. Everybody had me marked. Somehow, you know, I was a ringer and they knew it. I was just a suburban kid. You know, I was a fake. I wanted to go back and I want to read a little bit of what you wrote about your panic anxiety and your panic attacks.

20:38I think you were in your mid-20s, right, or a little when you started having very bad panic attacks. And you say that your long, silent subterranean demons rose up and you started having panic attacks. these attacks made me afraid to be with anyone, to go into public, to go anywhere far from home. And you also took out your panic on food, right? You would just, it sounds like get food, wolf it down and live with this panic that anyone listening who's had panic anxiety, and I have panic anxiety, you know, we can feel that feeling of even going down the street feels too far from home. But it sounds also like that was a time when your panic made you stop being able to work, to do the work you love around art.

21:29And that's when you became a truck driver. Looking back, what did that experience with panic teach you about yourself and what you needed to take care of yourself in the world and do your work? Well, you're really good at this, Maura. You're making me feel things. Oh dear, sorry. No, it's great. I think the hologram of self that I must have been projecting on the one hand and holding up from the inside, as it were, at all costs, struggling to maintain an appearance of, you know, I was then a successful artist and a successful kid that ran an art gallery, Artists Run Space. So before you became a truck driver, you were a successful young artist.

22:21Yeah, I made art. But then around, they'd always been there. But then the demons that speak to everybody spoke very loudly to me. And they said to me the same things they say to you and everybody listening. You can't do this. You're a fake. You don't know what you're doing. You didn't go to the right school. Your hair is no good. You have a bad neck. You know, you don't know how to schmooze. You don't have enough money. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I listened. And as a result, I went to hell. left the world. These panic attacks would keep, I had insomnia for a few years and that was a drag, but they kept me away from my world and I stopped myself from working.

23:22And that's when I became a long distance truck driver and spent 10 years on the road, resentful of everybody else, looking at it what everybody else had, feeling sorry for myself, being envious. One of the things I wrote is for anyone trying to get out of these things, you have to make an enemy of envy. Envy is in the service of everybody else but yourself. It's your eyes looking outward. And that's what I spent 10 years doing, hiding from the world, but looking at it, thinking, oh, you've got a trust fund. Or I know why he's got a good job. Or I know why she's getting what she's getting. Over and over until I finally was so miserable, Maura, in this life that I thought in the trucks, I thought anything would be better than what my life is now.

24:29And I decided, having never written a word in my life, I'll be an art critic. That must be easy. And, of course, if anybody listening to this has ever written, writing is horrible. I would rather do anything in the whole world than write. Well, but I'm just curious. So I have this image of you driving 10 years, stewing over your truck. filled with envy and rage. And that's the thing about depression. That's the thing about anxiety, right? It creates these monsters that never leave us. What was the moment where you said, screw this, I'm getting off the road and I'm going to write even though I'm going to hate it and it's hard and I'm probably going to be bad at it and I don't even have a college degree.

25:14Do you remember what made you save yourself? Um, again, I just think I thought it cannot get worse than I feel now, no matter how much rejection, no matter how much failure. And I was very, very poor. I lived in like a squat in the East Village, which was then overrun with heroin and then crack and then AIDS and everything else. But I have to remind listeners that I was also, the minute I began saying I'll be an art critic, I was ecstatic. 24 hours a day with no heat. I wasn't paying rent. There were dogs living in the hallway. and I was in heaven thinking, for the first time in my life, I'm now in pursuit of something, of trying to be, in this case, an art critic.

26:18I think it was just saying out loud, and this is why we love big cities, saying out loud to somebody when they said, what do you do? And I just lied, and I said, I'm an art critic. And I remember the person went, huh, cool. And I thought, that's it. I'm now an art critic because I say I am. I can invent myself. Well, I'm tearing up, Jerry, because I think that the beauty of work is something that we never talk about. Yeah. When it's totally in you. Did the envy go away? Envy went away. Fury went away. Instead, what you all know, anybody listening to this that has worked in any creative way, in a way, you never know what you're going to make until you make it.

27:20And then it always surprises you, like there was a ghost or a poltergeist inside of you that kind of arrived and had to do this. and you could control some of it, but a lot of it, you don't know where it comes from. And that feeling is incredible. And I never, ever want that to go away because it's a way, writing is a way I have of thinking, a way of seeing the world. Our work leads us to other work. Work only comes from work. Work does not come from worrying about work and thinking about maybe working someday. You've got to grow up, you big babies. You've got to get to work. That's what I decided, honestly, Maura.

28:16I thought, grow up, you big baby, you big white male suburban baby. And that goes for you too, Maura, and everybody listening. Woman up. Man up. I'm sorry this is hard. I'm sorry you're not rich. If you want to marry rich, do it. I'm amoral about whatever it takes anybody to get to work. And for me, getting to work, coincidentally, also meant not worrying about eating. This episode is brought to you by Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app. You know, I love clothes. And I love when the seasons change to spend a good amount of time, you know, moving out, reviewing my summer stuff, bringing in my fall stuff.

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31:52We were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy-to-read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month. and it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say, to how the S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me, frankly, take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me.

32:43Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code achiever at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core at half off just$50. That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. You know, if you if you had been to a therapist in all those years, they might have also said you had social anxiety, right? And all the the feeling of constantly being other and not measuring up. And, and I'm curious, though, if you think that you have any social anxiety and, and if you do, I feel like for me, my social anxiety powers a sort of inner dialogue that also feeds creativity.

33:36Um, yeah. An ability to perceive what other people also might not. Are, do you have a hard time like sitting at a dinner party, tomorrow? Oh, I have to either get totally drunk or, you know, have a serious talking to myself in the bathroom before I go. Absolutely. Right. I don't think you're alone in that. I have that. And I'm quote unquote famous, you know. Everyone wants to sit next to you at dinner, I bet. Yeah. But here's the problem with me. I doubt that anyone really does. But yeah, They want to sit next to Jerry Salt, senior art critic, blah, blah. One million followers, the whole thing.

34:18And I love all of that, mind you. I spend about 70 % of every day, Maura, thinking, God, am I lucky. I am so lucky to have escaped with my life and get this life that I have. But the truth is I have gone out, and Roberta and I are lucky. We're invited to every dinner party in New York. Sounds exciting. It is exciting to be invited. But I would say that I've gone to no more than 20 dinners in the last 10 years. Why? Two reasons. One is we finish our galleries on opening nights and on weekends around 8 o 'clock. We get a slice of pizza on 10th Avenue, cheap pizza that you get on a paper plate and eat with plastic knives and forks.

35:16Don't hate me. I appreciate great food, but. And then we go home and make our notes and get ready for work or we begin working. The other thing is I can't go to dinner parties because the minute I sit down next to you, I will look at you, this sort of amazing person, and I will say, what shows have you seen lately? And you'll go, well, I've been in Boston. And then I turn, I face forward, and I don't say a word for the rest of the meal. I have nothing to talk about. Why do you say you have nothing to talk about? Because you only want to talk about art or because I haven't seen shows? Tell me why.

35:58Or you just find small talk awful. My life is narrow. As someone once said, it's a tunnel life. I'm not part of society in a funny way. And I get nervous. I guess that is what is called social anxiety. It is what it is. And I wear quote unquote fame as a beautiful colored, you know, coat of many colors that keeps me safe. So I can be in the world and I'm recognized. And that part is fun. I have to say I like that because I wanted criticism to be able to reach people like me. I wanted art to be understood and not be intimidating for people like me. I wanted art criticism that didn't sound like the late Marxist commodified post-simulacra object of the Derrida Hegelian parallax.

37:03That stuff, I don't understand a word of that. I'm not sure who does. It's written by 155 people for 155 people. I didn't want that. So my work is very popular. It's very accessible. And what I found as a coping mechanism was to be, quote, famous in my tiny, tiny, tiny world. and that way I can, I guess, control my surroundings so I get to be invited to the dinner. I go around for the drinks and I don't really drink. I guess I have a beer. And then I can talk to everybody for four minutes. Wouldn't this be your ideal dinner party, Laura? It would be my ideal dinner party. You walk. You don't sit down.

37:55You say hi. You're brilliant. The other person amazes you. But here's the thing that's instructive for listeners who maybe aren't famous like you is that the reason I was so attracted to what you wrote and who you are is that you have crafted what sounds like exactly the life you want, doing the work that you love. Your limitations are so vividly present to you, right? You acknowledge them, but you have created your life. And does that sound true to you? And what advice do you have for someone listening who says, you know what? I don't want to pretend to be who I'm not. I want to do what Jerry does.

38:44I just want to do the work I love and screw everything else. I would say, Maura, that it's the easiest thing in the world. First, you have to get to work, you big baby. you have to work. I'm sorry. I've tried every way there is around work. So have you. So is every person listening to this. You have to be willing to get lost and become embarrassed when you work. I promise you when you begin to work, you will soon be humiliated, horrified by what you're doing, how bad it is, how revealing it is, how stupid you are, how bad your ankles really are. That's the first sign that you're beginning to do things that might be helpless for you to otherwise do, meaning you're doing what you must do.

39:43You must learn to write, to be, to behave in your, quote, own voice. That means, yes, you have to learn your skills. That means, in my case, looking at thousands of works of art, to never stop looking. But then be able to somehow say what I think in my own voice. And I want that voice in your work. I want your listeners to fly on extended wings. Stick out your scaredy-cat wings. you big baby, and there are no wasted days. You clear your desk, you clear the studio. The work you make should not be made for the distant future. The work you make, and for people that discover you after you die, the work you make should be addressed in the idiom of today and addressed to today.

40:47That doesn't mean it should be about Breonna Taylor and George Floyd And the coronavirus, not subject matter, just the material, the idiom, you want it to have that kind of urgency. Art, what you do, Maura, is a verb. It's not a thing. It's not a thing that sits in a file in somebody's phone. It's a verb that changes people's worlds while it's happening. My last question is some career advice from you. I came across this in something you wrote, and I just loved it, and I'd love you to explain why it's powerful. You say John Cage said, quote, always be around, end quote, and I was. All that allowed me to finally see the sun.

41:42What does always being around mean? Here's what it means, Maura. That Jerry and Maura might have a social disease, and that is they're afraid sometimes of being around people that they won't measure up, that they want to go home, that they'll have a panic attack or they're too thin or fat. But all of us are vampires, and we must stay up late, online or in person. every night, my brothers and sisters, with other vampires, people half crazy the way you are half crazy, to invent these new languages, to carve these new idioms, to know what each other means when they speak, to you must show up. You can't just hide out.

42:39It doesn't work that way. It Works that way for me now, but I've earned that. I went from my 40s all the way till I was 60, 20 years of failing in public every night, even though I was poor and had a full-time job all that time as a chauffeur driver, a limo driver. I worked in galleries, but I went out every night with my terror, and that's what I mean show up. Do your work. Why is that not workaholism, though? Oh, my God. I never even thought of it. I think it's life-ism. And I love showing up. It doesn't, I don't know. Therapists listen to this. I don't think it's, Maura and I get deep pleasure from it.

43:28And we know how to get pleasure from taking walks and watching bad TV and yelling at our cat. But we also know how to go to parties and learn the new idiom of 2020. And if that's workaholism, you know, I'll have double. Jerry Saltz, thank you so much. You are amazing. And I'm grateful to be here with your listeners.

43:59That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.