Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews

Rating:
Summary: critical agendas
Review: This volume collects the most seminal of Michael Fried's critical writings from the 1960's, including "Three American Painters," "Morris Louis," and the title essay. He hasn't written criticism of contemporary art for over thirty years. From any other critic, a 75 page introduction would seem self-indulgent and anachronistic. As it is, the ambition and intensity of these essays require contextualization. It turns out that their art-critical context is both familiar and alien. That fact that many of the strongest pieces here were first published in Artforum measures their uncanniness. Championing a doomed 'advanced' art and its formalist criticism, he cites Hegel's definition of history as the seed of the future within the present. That this seed may be possibly sterile and powerless to effect change is the hard lesson of Fried's incomparable work for the historiography of contemporary artistic practice.