Clichés Reach Critical Mass, Take Writers Down Slippery Slope
Blake Gopnik
© July 27, 2012
Staff Art Critic/ Newsweek Magazine and The Daily Beast
It’s not news that there’s a crisis in art criticism, at least in the mass media. Full time
critics are being shed from magazine after magazine, newspaper after newspaper.
There may not be more than a dozen staff critics left across the United States. This
isn’t just a crisis for those of us who’ve lost our jobs, or think we soon may. If art
matters – as our culture still seems to think it does, given museum attendance and
expansions – then the fate of popular criticism does as well, since most nonspecialists have no other source of substantial talk about art.
But there’s one aspect of the crisis that’s not much commented on: We popular
critics may deserve our fate. We’ve set ourselves such modest goals that the public
doesn’t care if we achieve them – or disappear. As publishing budgets get tight, we
have allowed ourselves to become a frill that can be cut without anyone
complaining, or maybe even noticing.
We can get to the source of this disregard by looking at quotes from art reviews by
three major critics1:
– “You miss the physical sensuousness of French painting. Sometimes you wish the
Victorians had given freer rein to their brushwork and expressive impulses,” writes
a reviewer of a show of late 19th-century British art.
– “Five giant color photos of old mattresses … sullied with spreading stains of bodily
fluids …. are genuinely beautiful pictures …. [The artist] plays aesthetic midwife,
giving a new life of beauty to possessions otherwise too deeply caught up in the
bump-and-grind of living to get much attention,” writes another, reviewing a
contemporary artist named Carolyn White.
– “Freud’s brush may nuzzle into the hollow of a hip or cradle the exact weight of a
sagging breast … the action symbolically unites hand, eye, mind and sexual feeling .…
Freud is less a painter than ‘the Painter,’ performing the rites of his medium in the
sacristy of his studio … Standing close to [his paintings], sometime I have the odd
sense of passing through a looking glass – or is it a time machine? – from the art
world that I know into one marked by lusher, smokier satisfaction” – a passage,
obviously, from a review of a Lucien Freud show.
I am not providing the authors of these or similar quotes – who might just include
me – since the point of this essay is not to put down specific critics, but to diagnose a
problem that’s ubiquitous in the field.
1
As I hope is clear from these examples, the problem we are facing is an addiction to
cliché. It is an addiction to notions, for instance, that Gallic painting is naturally free
and brushy and full of some mythic thing called “expressive impulses” (despite all
the licked, inexpressive surfaces that dominated the Paris salons) while Anglo-Saxon
painting, like a Limey’s upper lip, is stiff and emotion-free (despite Constable’s skies
and Turner’s storms at sea). It is an addiction to notions that an artist’s job is to
show us the beauty in the abject everyday (as critics have been saying at least since
Rembrandt). And it’s an addiction to notions that painting is a Dionysian rite – “lush
and smoky” – with the artist as its priest, oil paint as its sacrament and the
transubstantiation of paint into flesh as its greatest miracle. Again and again, massmedia art writers fall back on such hackneyed formulas for explaining what art is,
what it does, and what might make it good or bad. What we rarely do is try to forge
new, transformative accounts of the art we write about. Not only has there come to
be a dearth of truly significant art criticism, but that doesn’t even seem to be set as a
goal.
In recent decades, popular art criticism has bought into what I think of as the “wall
text” fallacy: That there are certain basic, “natural” things you’d want to say about
any given work of art, and that once you’ve fed your reader those, you’ve done most
of your job. The standard defense of critical cliché is that our average readers are so
ignorant about art that just giving them some standard information and
conventional interpretations still leaves them ahead of where they started out. But I
believe that if that’s all you’ve done, you’ve in fact done almost nothing. Uttering
clichés – saying the already-said – is in fact the equivalent of keeping silent, because
clichés are not true communication. They pretend to narrate a real encounter with
the world (in this case with art) but in fact they are just a rehash of other encounters
that already took place. Or they’re barely even that, very often: At their worst, they
merely rehash the forms of words used to describe past encounters. A paragraph or
whole review goes down easy for the reader, and is easier to write, when we’ve
heard what it has to say, and written what it pretends to think, a hundred times
before. It doesn’t have to carry thoughts that make a reader do the hard work of
understanding; it simply gives them words to digest. Clichés, you could say, are
criticism’s carbon monoxide: they replace real thought the way carbon monoxide
replaces the oxygen in our blood, quickly leading to brain death.
The repetition of received ideas seem to me especially pernicious when it comes to
art because it can actually limit what gets seen when we look at a picture. The great
thing about any art that’s halfway decent is that there’s so much information in it
that there’s always something new to see – so long as there’s a reason for looking.
Clichés, however, can easily point readers to the same information again and again:
Monet becomes the original Painter of Light, to the exclusion of anything else he
might have been up to. Art-critical clichés keep you attending the same way every
time you encounter a work.
Clichés may reduce the real complexity of any good work of art to a few pat,
received ideas about it, but that’s only part of their failing. They also get the nature
of artistic excellence wrong. They imply that a work of art is valuable for the specific
messages it sends, or the impacts it reliably has. A Rembrandt portrait of an old
woman, for instance, is supposed to be admired for what it says about the so-called
“human condition” and for the empathy it calls up in us. On this account, the work is
just an instrument for putting certain fixed thoughts into our minds or reliably
triggering the same set of sensations and emotions in our brains. The work of art
becomes the paper a telegraph is printed on, useful only for the stable information it
carries. Whereas I prefer a much more active model where the work gets value from
the process of decipherment it launches – it’s a model where the virtue of art lies in
a drawn-out process it sets off, in which we struggle to come to grips with its
meanings. The moment when we settle on a single meaning and move on is closer to
a moment of failure, of giving up, than to a moment of success and completion. This
account, at least, rings most true to my own best moments of looking at art, where
page after page of my notebook fills up with ideas and interpretations that hadn’t
come to mind before, and that may even be mutually exclusive. The most notable
thing about great artists such as Titian or Cézanne is that their works seem to
exceed even the most brilliant single readings that have been attached to them. And
if even the finest readings can never seem quite final, then they can never boil down
to cliché, since they always beg to be completed or even replaced. At least some
great works of art, that is, have built into them a kind of internal polemic against
received ideas, by letting us know how inadequate every reading of them is.
I like to think of art objects as machines for thinking, rather than as transmitters of
finished thoughts. Criticism’s most basic duty may be to communicate that larger
notion, rather than to transmit single readings of single works. In other words, a
good review, or a good critic’s career, ought to model art’s conceptual fertility. It
ought to convey the generative ability of art in general, rather than the specific fruits
of any one work of art. A good piece of critical writing needs to communicate the
critic’s search (even his failure) as much as what’s come out of the searching. And if
that’s right, it’s yet another argument against critical clichés, since they imply a fixed
store of stable thoughts that need to be transmitted about art, and retransmitted
time after time. Clichés cannot talk about art’s vastly productive flux because they
don’t believe in it.
When works of art are reduced to their clichés, there’s a sense that they become
surplus goods. Who needs the artifact itself, if its virtues can be encapsulated in a set
of fixed ideas? Just putting an object into a museum and declaring it to be art denies
it any kind of normal function. That object is of even less use once it can be replaced
by a wall text or by a few standard reactions and ideas we already know that it is
supposed to trigger. If you’ve absorbed the fact (or cliché) that Monet’s art is all
about optical play and its capture by a speedy brush, there isn’t much reason for
attending yet again to the pictures that prove and re-prove that dimension. Novel
readings, on the other hand, can reanimate a work as something worth re-attending
to, since it turns out to be entirely un-exhausted by the established takes on it. Even
if one new interpretation is rejected as wrong or implausible or unhelpful, it invites
an audience to replace it with a new one that is a better fit. That is, it suggests that
works of art demand and repay active reading, rather than a passive acceptance of
what’s already known and written about them. New interpretations, and the act of
interpreting they advertise, give us new reasons for attending to actual works.
That’s as great a service to art and its audience as there ever could be.
Now it’s important that “attending to actual works” not boil down to the ur-cliché of
art criticism – to the notion that a critic can simply look very hard, with an
aesthete’s eagle-sharp eyes, and winkle out the truth about a piece. “Understanding
is not the way we get the world. It’s through experience,” said one senior critic a few
years ago, but that probably gets “getting” wrong. Even babies, psychologists tell us,
build their world-view by making mental arguments about the nature of reality and
then testing them to see if they work. There is no transparent experience to which
they have direct access without conducting those thought experiments. Critics can’t
do any better. The critic isn’t just a tuning fork that vibrates in brilliant sympathy
with certain works, allowing him to arrive at their essences. That model, it seems to
me, turns the critic into a guaranteed cliché-generator, since the vibration is almost
certain to happen according to accepted ideas of what those essences are. (The very
idea of “directly accessible essences” may invoke the kinds of stable readings that I
see as indistinguishable from clichés.) Accounts that pretend to be “just” responding
to the picture itself seem most prone to cliché and least able to generate new ideas
about it. “What stuck in the viewer's mind were [the painter’s] … mappings of the
troublesome weather-systems that cross an uncertain artist's soul as he works
alone, towards an unknown future, in his studio,” wrote one senior critic, apparently
“responding” directly to a picture, but in the process piling up clichés about the
troubled, soulful artist as existentialist hero.
Even a writer as great as John Updike seems to fall into cliché when he’s “just
describing” what he sees in Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning: “The dawn …
arrives stealthily, while the windows still sleep, and we think of the inhabitants
behind those curtains, dreaming or groggily stirring as the day, like an ambitious
merchant, is already setting up shop.” It’s not the writing or the metaphor itself that
strikes me as notably weak, here. It’s the hackneyed structure of the argument,
whereby the picture is billed as a trigger for a kind of imaginary divagation through
its scene.
No critical discussion of art is a direct, unmediated, “natural” account of an object or
our reactions to it. If you study the historiography of art, there was always a first
moment when someone suggested attending to art in one particular way. All
accounts of art (quite possibly like all accounts of the world) are built around a
constructed argument about what features and reactions matter, and in what ways.
The question, then, is whether critics want to use someone else’s received
constructions or take the risk of building something of their own. “One is, after all,
always at fault,” says the theorist Irit Rogoff, “since every year we become aware of a
new and hitherto unrealized perspective.”2
In science, the fact that cannonballs and apples fall at the same speed stays true and
important over many centuries. Whereas in art criticism, the moment that a claim
starts to seem patently true – that it gels into cliché – is just the moment when we
may want to abandon it as limiting our field of view. When Leonardo da Vinci
argues for the notion that important art should be as realistic as possible in about
1500, it’s a productive model for both artists and audiences. And now of course it is
one of the rare claims that is such an obvious cliché that almost no one dares
advance it. (I look forward to the day when notions of “self-expression” suffer a
similar fate.) Clement Greenberg’s claim, in the 1950s, that an art work must
address the “natural” values of its medium – flatness for painting, space for
sculpture, narrative for the novel – was equally productive and is now equally
hackneyed and untenable. That, I believe, is the good and proper fate of almost
every significant claim about art: It starts as insight, degenerates into cliché and
eventually passes away. The last thing we ought to want is for it to keep passing as
timelessly true, and to keep being repeated in reviews and wall texts.
It ought to seem strange that an activity like artmaking, that seems to have at its
heart a commitment to rethinking stale forms and ideas, should so often be
approached using stale critical forms and ideas. If nothing else, you’d think art
“What Is A Theorist”, The State of Art Criticism, ed. James Elkins and Michael
Newman (Routledge: New York and London, 2008), 100. Rogoff goes further,
insisting that the need to rethink our readings has a political edge.
2
criticism would be inspired to be inventive by the inventive objects and creators it
covers.
My model bills the critic as something close to a Shakespearean director, whose job
is to open up the plays in new ways, rather than to illustrate, once again, that Hamlet
is an indecisive procrastinator or that Othello’s got possessiveness issues. In the 21st
century, we seem more likely to value a director who provides unlikely but
stimulating readings (even failed ones) than one who repeats such old chestnuts.
We should hold art critics to the same standards.
------------I’m hoping that my screed against clichés is holding together, at least in the very
general terms I’ve been using. Things get more complicated, however, when it
comes to the actual matter of writing reviews in the popular press. A full-time
newspaper or magazine critic is likely to be writing at least two pieces a week. Given
that workload, and subjects that range from the pyramids to performance art, how
is it possible to function without recourse to received ideas? Can critics be expected
to find brand new things to say 100 times every year, on topics they may know close
to nothing about? Don’t they need the crutch of cliché just to get the job done? I say
they can throw away that crutch because there’s a much better one at hand.
Working critics can get the support they need from academic art history. After all,
art historians are, in theory at least, paid to come up with brilliant new thoughts on
their subjects and are given the time and resources to do it. The best of their work is,
or ought to be, a cliché-free well of ideas for art critics to draw on. Of course it’s true
that most art history is tired or obscure or pedantic, as is most scholarship in all
fields. But that still leaves a small percentage of publications – more than any single
art critic could keep up with – that manages to shed genuinely new light on works of
art from entirely new directions.
Looking at the 11th-century baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, with its very
medieval white and green stripes, art historians Alexander Nagel and Christopher
Wood have shown how, through a complicated process of productive anachronism,
the building “counted as” a Roman temple for Renaissance viewers. The great
architects Filippo Brunelleschi and Giorgio Vasari could “look through the eleventhand twelfth-century buildings of Florence to the true meaning hiding behind them,
namely, the normativity of the ancient Roman building manner,” write the two
scholars.3
3Alexander
Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (Zone Books:
New York, 2010), 136.
When Alexander Nemerov, a scholar at Yale, looks at the abstract veils and stripes
that Morris Louis painted in the early 1960s, he doesn’t find only a formal game
with color and line, and the playing out of the period’s Greenbergian ideas about art.
He detects a whole social and cultural nexus that links those paintings to the
Camelot moment in Washington under John F. Kennedy and to the liberal values of
Kennedy’s Brain Trust. 4
These are the kinds of “live” claims about art that pop critics can and should be
channeling, since they give new life to the works their readers encounter. Nemerov
has said that he hopes his interpretations “will go off as a trigger, as an
illumination,” making viewers see the work “as though they’ve never seen it
before.”5 At the very least, by borrowing from the latest art history, critics give their
readers access to ideas they haven’t encountered before, even if those readers end
up rejecting them. Whereas when writers rely on the old critical chestnuts, they are
simply confirming the thoughts their readers have already had, as well as their
prejudices.
Mass-media critics, unencumbered by new ideas in art history, are likely to build
their discussions around issues that don’t have much life left in them. One senior
critic, discussing a project by the British artist Jeremy Deller called “It Is What It Is:
Conversations About Iraq'', wrote that “Deller has included a visually compelling
element: the crumpled, rusty remains of a car that was destroyed in a suicide
bomber's attack in Baghdad. It has terrific sculptural presence, but it's not an
artwork; it's an artifact and a conversation piece.” That critic is willing to invoke the
old and almost pointless – and thoroughly clichéd – debate about what might or
might not be art, whereas an art historian would be likely to move on from there to
ask the much more potent, culturally relevant question of how Deller’s car wreck,
presented as a work of art that is “visually compelling … with terrific sculptural
presence,” manages to bring meaning to its viewers. Good art history, less weighed
down than criticism by a need to give thumbs-up or thumbs-down, is more likely to
feel compelled to find stimulating readings of whatever works get put in its path.
Asking art critics to channel the best of art history may seem too ambitious a
demand, given the time pressures of newspaper and magazine work. But in fact I
want to push them – us – even further. It’s not enough for art critics to parrot
Alexander Nemerov, “Morris Louis: Court Painter of the Kennedy Era”, in Morris
Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (High Museum of Art: Atlanta, 2006).
5 Quoted in Blake Gopnik, “Edward Hopper and the Rising Tide of War”, The
Washington Post, November 18, 2007, M8.
4
specific art historical findings, like a Coles Notes version of the latest scholarly texts.
(Although that could nevertheless be useful, filtering the often turgid prose and
thought of art history through “the particular clarity and openness that has always
been the hallmark of great critical writing”.6) I see such parroting as just a good start
for the critic’s profession. My ideal model for art criticism has it taking principles
enunciated in art history – the novel ways of thinking that structure a new body of
art-historical thought – and applying them “live” (don’t try this at home, kids) to the
many different works and shows encountered over the course of a year on the art
beat. Art criticism should be to art history what clinical psychology is to
experimental psych: The place where the latest discoveries and approaches come
most fully into contact with the world.
I hope that, on a few occasions at least, I’ve managed to put this model into practice.
Let me dwell for a bit on the two examples I’ve already cited – on Alexander Nagel’s
ideas about a “flexible classicism” in Renaissance art and on Nemerov’s use of
expanded social contexts for understanding modern pictures.
Nagel’s arguments became useful to me a few years back when I was reviewing a
show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York about the contacts between
Venetian and Ottoman cultures in the 15th and 16th centuries.7 The exhibition simply
surveyed works from east and west, underlining the borrowings back and forth and
the cultural and political realities that let those borrowings happen. What I tried to
do in my review of the Met show was to deny that “borrowing” was the right way of
thinking about what was going on – to deny that Venetians were necessarily
thinking about 16th-century Ottomans when they took from their art and culture.
Instead, following Nagel’s lead, I claimed that when a Venetian artist included
Ottoman features in a work, they were meant to point to the classical world of
Christ’s era. A painting by the Venetian Giovanni Mansueti, from about 1518 and
showing Saint Mark baptizing the pagan Anianus in Alexandria, has an urban setting
that would traditionally be read as a naïve and anachronistic pastiche of
Renaissance buildings from northern Italy, with their trademark round arches and
decorative marbles. The turbaned Egyptians that Mansueti placed in those buildings
would normally be seen as a generically exotic, orientalizing borrowing from the
Ottoman empire with which the Venetians had such close and vexed contact. The
standard idea is that the painter’s historically naïve culture left him stuck talking
about his own times, even when his painting’s subject dated to another era.
Stephen Melville, “Criticism in the University,” in The State of Art Criticism, eds.
James Elkins and Michael Newman (Routledge: New York and London, 2008), 118.
7 Blake Gopnik, “When Venice Looked Eastward; Renaissance Artists Borrowed from
Islam to Evoke Classical Culture,” The Washington Post, May 13, 2007, N6.
6
Following Nagel’s model, however, I argued that those “Renaissance” buildings
would have been seen as fully neo-classical, and therefore as an accurate depiction
of the Roman Near East of the New Testament. (Let’s not forget that our own
standard, white-marble vision of classical antiquity is equally flawed, given all the
color that would originally have been applied to those marbles.) I also argued that
the turbaned figures placed in Mansueti’s structures, with every detail of their
“Ottoman” costumes accurately recorded, would have been seen as a best-guess
approximation of Saint Mark’s original audience – not as Ottomans at all, but as the
“Gentiles” of the Bible. Mansueti, that is, was acting rather like the anthropologist
who extrapolates from the culture of today’s Kalahari bushmen to get at how early
humans might have lived. Nagel’s research hadn’t addressed the particular objects
in the Met show, but by applying his principles I hope I allowed my readers to recast
Mansueti’s naïve anachronism as sophisticated historical thinking.
My use of Alexander Nemerov’s research happened at an even greater remove from
the specifics of that scholar’s work. Nemerov is well known for interpreting art
objects in terms of a wide range of cultural analogues of their era. His “Camelot”
reading of the work of Morris Louis brought in evidence from the space program
and a pro-Kennedy poem by Robert Frost and the purchasing habits of the Democrat
James Mitchener. His reading of Edward Hopper’s 1939 painting titled
“Groundswell”, showing a nice little sailboat at sea, invoked Hitler’s invasion of
Poland, a vintage Atwater Kent Radio (such as news of war might have been heard
on) and a wartime poem by W.H. Auden, all to suggest that the picture, cheeryseeming at first, in fact was channeling a larger mood of looming dread in the
culture. The Nemerov method opens up works of art by looking at them in the very
broadest cultural contexts. It brings to bear evidence from material and political
culture, rather than just from the period texts that actually talk about the pictures in
question; it invokes things we can’t see in a painting to explain things we can – or
more importantly, to make us aware of what the picture leaves out. This is the
model I used in an analysis of the nature photographs of Ansel Adams, which I don’t
believe Nemerov has ever discussed.8
In my Nemerovian exercise, I argued that those pictures of the pristine wilds of
America are in fact about the technological and automotive culture they were
bathing in. Adams’s legendary “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” was the product
of a cross-country drive in the Pontiac station wagon that Adams dwells on in his
account of getting the shot at 4:49 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1941, by the side of Highway 84.
(Note how his account is built around the technology of clocks and calendars and
Blake Gopnik, “The Viewfinder: For Ansel Adams, Nature and Technology Met at
the Horizon,” The Washington Post, Sept. 15, 2007, C1.
8
maps.) The darkroom tricks that Adams used in making his exquisite prints of the
scene are technophilic in the extreme, closer to what goes on in a science lab than in
the traditional artist’s studio; that technique is part of the image’s appeal to modern
eyes, making it closer to a gleaming Bauhaus picture of gears than to a Turner night
scene. In a classically American move, Adams has transferred a machine aesthetic
out of the big city and into the continent’s outback.
Similarly, Adams’s famous pictures of a pristine Yosemite came out of new access
that the automobile gave to that “wilderness”, not just for Adams, with his stacks of
high-tech camera equipment, but for the urban nature-lovers who made up his
audience and whom Adams used to lead to the park in automotive cavalcades. I was
even able to find a stash of commercial photographs that Adams shot advertising the
great American car in the great American wilds. Those pictures merely made explicit
the culture of technology that, I argued, is there as a ghost in all the Adams’s photos
where the car is so notably absent. As Nemerov said about Hopper’s painting, “Its
autonomy is always bound up with, or commenting on, the world it so beautifully
excludes.”9 My version of that claim was that the absence of technology in Adams’s
photos is as much a part of their content as their very present, machine-free
landscapes are.
And I could make that claim – that unclichéd claim, I hope – because I’d taken on an
art historian’s new model for thinking about pictures. There’s even a chance that,
because of the relative freedom of newspaper writing – no peer-review to cope with,
no looming sense that your words will be passed down to future generations of
thinkers – I had room to experiment with new ideas and examples and on-the-fly
readings that some scholars might not risk.
Pop criticism’s reliance on cliché and received ideas is all the more shocking because
in fact it is one place where few people mind if you stray. Most of your readers, and
even your editors, come to you with so few ideas about art, and so little investment
in established views, that you can head in new directions without anyone knowing
you’ve done it.
People say that newspapers are the “first draft of history”. I’d like to turn that cliché
into actual thought by suggesting that art criticism could be the first draft of art
history. But for it to do that, it has to leave its favorite bromides behind.
Quoted in Blake Gopnik, “Edward Hopper and the Rising Tide of War”, The
Washington Post, November 18, 2007, M8.
9
I am not providing the authors of these or similar quotes – who might just include me – since the
point of this essay is not to put down specific critics, but to diagnose a problem that’s ubiquitous in
the field.
2 “What Is A Theorist”, The State of Art Criticism, ed. James Elkins and Michael Newman (Routledge:
New York and London, 2008), 100. Rogoff goes further, insisting that the need to rethink our
readings has a political edge.
3Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (Zone Books: New York, 2010),
136.
4 Alexander Nemerov, “Morris Louis: Court Painter of the Kennedy Era”, in Morris Louis Now: An
American Master Revisited (High Museum of Art: Atlanta, 2006).
5 Quoted in Blake Gopnik, “Edward Hopper and the Rising Tide of War”, The Washington Post,
November 18, 2007, M8.
6Stephen Melville, “Criticism in the University,” in The State of Art Criticism, eds. James Elkins and
Michael Newman (Routledge: New York and London, 2008), 118.
7 Blake Gopnik, “When Venice Looked Eastward; Renaissance Artists Borrowed from Islam to Evoke
Classical Culture,” The Washington Post, May 13, 2007, N6.
8Blake Gopnik, “The Viewfinder: For Ansel Adams, Nature and Technology Met at the Horizon,” The
Washington Post, Sept. 15, 2007, C1.
9 Quoted in Blake Gopnik, “Edward Hopper and the Rising Tide of War”, The Washington Post,
November 18, 2007, M8.
Blake Gopnik was born in Philadelphia in 1963 and raised in Montreal, where he
received his B.A. from McGill University, with a concentration in medieval studies
and Latin. He then earned a PhD in art history from Oxford University for a
dissertation on Renaissance realism and the philosophy of representation.
Returning to Canada, in 1995 Gopnik became the editor of Insite, Canada’s leading
magazine on architecture and design, and then fine-arts editor, and finally art critic,
at the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. In 2001, he was hired as the
chief art critic of the Washington Post, where he spent the following decade writing
about art and other aesthetic topics, including design and gastronomy.
He left Washington for New York in January, 2011, to write about art and design for
Newsweek magazine and its Daily Beast Web site. He is also involved in current
debates about neuroesthetics and the intersection of science and art.