i take the bait

"Our colleague Jerry Saltz who teaches at Columbia has also dropped by Natalie’s studio"

Jerry Saltz had thirty-two articles published on Artnet between 12/2004 and 12/2005, sixteen of which were individual artist features. Eight of those were of NYC artists, three of whom are Columbia graduates, one of whom (until very recently anyway) is faculty.

Jerry knows which side his bread is buttered on. The features mentioned above focus on single artists, but there are plenty of two or more artist articles with an inordinate number of favorable Columbia mentions. Here is a 12/7 feature on Columbia professor Jon Kessler. Here is a 11/10 article on recent graduate Laleh Khorramian, sandwiched between two articles on European men. The Khorramian article notes that "Khorramian has yet to master the art of melding sound and image (something her Columbia colleague Mika Rottenberg excels at)".

The funniest example is probably the review of the Greater NY show, in which he admits that having 31 Columbia graduates and current students in the exhibition of 162 artists feels fishy, yet includes seven of those Columbia students among the nineteen artists he chooses to name. Six of those Columbia artists are described as "excellent", with the seventh, Tamy Ben-Tor's video, deemed "one of the strongest pieces in the show". The non-Columbia artists mentioned are variously described as "rowdy artists turned tidy", "left to die in hallways", and "intriguing", followed by a parenthetical listing of twelve women artists cited as examples of some of the better artists in the show. Four of the seven photos of artwork (from a show of one hundred sixty-two artists) accompanying the article are the work of the Columbia-affiliated artists.

Oh, only FOUR of those sixteen consecutive individual artists featured were women. Does anybody not notice Jerry's propensity to pay lip-service to a problem (like the absence of women, or the hyping of youth and the market) but then continue to write as if that problem doesn't exist and he isn't a big part of the problem?