Art Criticism

Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) as well as editor of The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955 (2020), Painting Is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993 (2021), and Devotion: today’s future becomes tomorrow archive (2022). His criticism has been published in magazines and exhibition catalogues around the world and appears regularly in the New York Review of Books.

Dave Hickey (1938–2021) was an American art critic and essayist known for his sharp wit and keen eye. In the late sixties, he opened A Clean Well-Lighted Place—an art gallery in Austin named after the short story by Ernest Hemingway—before moving to New York, where he worked as the director of the Reese Palley Gallery. He served as the executive editor for Art in America; staff songwriter at Glaser Publications, in Nashville; and arts editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He later served as associate professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His writing appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Village Voice, and Vanity Fair, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. He received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1994 and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2001 for his influential art criticism. His books include The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997).

A scholar and critical theorist, Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin. His interests range broadly across the field of modern and contemporary art. His publications include Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (coauthored, 2004), Doubt (2008), Between Sense and de Kooning (2011), Ellsworth Kelly: New York Drawings 1954–1962 (2014), Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969–2019 (2020), and Sensuous Thoughts: Essays on the Work of Donald Judd (2020). He is currently completing a comprehensive study of the art of Jack Whitten.