Rather than a topic or theme, I would propose an occasion\u2014an occasion of celebration and taking stock. Michael Fried has been at the forefront of art-critical and art-historical discourse for sixty years and counting; this Critics Page reflects on the wide swath he has plowed through artistic and literary studies from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. His bracing, rigorous, and provocative writing has jolted artists and art historians into choruses of both approbation and rebuke. He\u2019s now in his ninth decade and nothing has changed. A set of three new publications forthcoming in early spring, from Eris Press in the United Kingdom and Columbia University Press in the United States, will doubtless further electrify readers. These new books comprise a collection of previously published essays, a group of interviews that includes one\u2014titled\u00a0Exit Interview\u2014in which Fried interviews himself, and, for the first time, a book of his prose poems, more than two hundred of them, all written in the last several years. Fried is now in the process of compiling his entire body of poetry for future publication. All of which is to say\u2014as he did recently in an email to me\u2014he is \u201cgetting [his] legacy in order.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fried\u2019s legacy is the prompt to which the artists, art historians, philosophers, and literary scholars below respond. Their comments are as rich and varied, as driven and intense, as Fried\u2019s own passionate writings. I want only to note here (as I have before in my own publications) that everything I know about art\u2014how to look, how to think about what I see, and how to mine the relay between object and beholder\u2014I learned from Michael Fried. The grand idea may come if the right questions of a work are asked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rather than a topic or theme, I would propose an occasion\u2014an occasion of celebration and taking stock. Michael…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-122047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}