“I love art; have spent my whole life looking at and thinking about — and for a time, making it; yet sometimes art even seems like a mystery to me,” says New York Magazine senior art critic Jerry Saltz, who wrote this week’s cover story on how to be an artist, in six steps and 33 rules. Last year, Saltz shared his experience as a “failed artist” in a magazine feature (part of a body of work that won him the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in criticism), and since it was published people kept asking him questions about being an artist. “So I started thinking about it more, making notes, writing things down. I had scraps of paper all over the house,” he says. “Then, in a 36-hour straight fever dream this summer I wrote a 26-page single-space memo about all this and sent it unread to my editor [David Wallace-Wells] and the editor-in-chief [Adam Moss]. Luckily I wasn’t fired. We just boiled it all down.”
The split cover run features photo-illustrations of Saltz as Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, and Frida Kahlo, the latter two based on self-portraits by the artists, Dalí based on a photograph. Saltz likes the Dalí best: “It gets something of my inner ham and outer crazy that feels close to the bone. And almost hurts. Is funny, embarrassing, strange, intense.” While he found wearing makeup for the Kahlo cover an “incredible experience,” he had resisted being cast as her: “afraid my pantomime clowning might seem like a comment on her. Her visage is so strong, however, that it beats off all pretenders. Including me. What a God she was. And is.”