Art Criticism
Story Stream
Peter Schjeldahl’s Pleasure Principle December 10, 2024
It can be argued, with some important caveats and qualifications, that Peter Schjeldahl was the most inventive, entertaining, and self-observing art critic to have ever worked in the English language. For 60 years, give or take, he struck himself lik...
Conservatives Can Curate Art for Themselves December 04, 2024
Does Philip Kennicott know what year it is? The Washington Post arts critic just published an essay that seems to have arrived in a time portal from 1986.“In Grim Times, Art Finds a Way” is a pious, flowery, and tiresome essay about how “the arts com...
On Dave Hickey October 26, 2023
In his essay “Frivolity and Unction,” from his extraordinary 1997 collection Air Guitar, the essayist and critic Dave Hickey proposes that we (writers, artists, etc.) stop thinking about our work as potentially important to the world and accept inste...
