Art's Prospect

by Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball's incisive essays examine the art world from a fresh, skeptical perspective. From Gauguin and the Pre-Raphaelites to the latest exercises in artistic absurdity, Kimball's keen eye and lucid prose makes for bracing, entertaining reading. He sets himself dead against the shallow rhetoric and celebrity/money culture of the contemporary art world, breathing new excitement into debates over what we value in art and why. Art's Prospect is savage and hilarious in debunking chalatanism, but at the same time informed and insightful in revealing the best of contemporary art. Whether he is meditating on the concept of kitsch in the Pre-Raphaelites, the cultural pathology that has led critics to compare Gilbert and George's preposterous images with the Isenheim altarpiece, or the genius of such disparate painters as Paul Gauguin and Richard Diebenkorn, Kimball proves himself to be one of the liveliest critical minds in the art world today.

Genres: Art

222 pages, ebook

First published June 1, 2002

About the author

American art critic and social commentator. He was educated at Cheverus High School, a Jesuit institution in South Portland, Maine, and then at Bennington College, where he received his BA in philosophy and classical Greek, and at Yale University. He first gained prominence in the early 1990s with the publication of his book, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education.

Additionally, he is editor and publisher of The New Criterion magazine and the publisher of Encounter Books. He currently serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the board of Transaction Publishers and as a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college based in Savannah, Georgia. He also served on the Board of Visitors of St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe). His latest book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, was published by St. Augustine's Press in June of 2012.