Documentary Profiles Art Critics Saltz and Smith
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- Alison Chernick directed "House of Criticism," a documentary profiling married art critics Jerry Saltz (New York magazine) and Roberta Smith (co-chief art critic of the New York Times), two of America's last powerful legacy critics.
- Roberta Smith decided to retire from the New York Times, and the film culminates in that transition — leaving open what her identity becomes without the role, with her telling Saltz, "You're my infrastructure."
- Jerry Saltz won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2018; the review argues his poetic showmanship arguably makes him the greater writer, though he frames Smith as the superior critic as a form of "chivalry."
- The couple attend 20 to 30 art shows per week, have no children, and rarely socialize, subsisting on what the review calls "drone food" — Saltz's favorite is the grilled chicken at Gristede's supermarket.
- Lena Dunham is the couple's goddaughter and appears late in the film, prompting a conversation about why they never had kids.
- Saltz was shaped by trauma: his mother committed suicide when he was 10, and a solo visit she arranged to the Art Institute of Chicago two weeks before her death ignited his love of art; he later drove 10-wheelers full of paintings for a decade.
Why it matters: The documentary arrives as Smith ends her long run at the Times, dramatizing a generational turning point — two critics who built their identities and marriage around art and each other now confront what comes next. Their "happy losers" lifestyle, 20-30 shows a week with no other hobbies, is held up as a portrait of a vanishing New York literary culture in which criticism was treated as a vocation rather than a content stream.
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