The art critic Jerry Saltz took thousands of photographs of the New York art world throughout the 1990s. Every opening he went to, every party and studio visit was documented with his Olympus Stylus. Over the years, he developed roll after roll of film, and he found a processing place in Los Angeles to turn them into slides. “I knew nothing about photography,” he tells the writer-director G. Anthony Svatek. “I ended up making 40,000 goddamn slides.”
My Lost Art World
That’s the title of the short film Svatek made with Jerry, who has unearthed those images, until recently gathering dust in his basement, for the benefit of New York’s annual “Yesteryear” issue. Taken together, they make up a scrapbook of the art world before it became a sprawling trade floor for blue-chip tangible assets. Back then, it was rambunctious and pure, a “village of pirates and dirty shamans,” as Jerry puts it in the introduction to his photo album. The ’90s, he says, “was a tremendous period of great magic, of great energy, imagination. And it’s in the fabric of what we do today.”
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 20, 2026, issue of
New York Magazine.
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 20, 2026, issue of
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