Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries

In essays culled from three decades of critical writing, Donald Kuspit explores the aesthetic developments of the twentieth century, from post-impressionism to the latest permutation of post-Modernism. Ranging from Willem de Kooning to Andy Warhol to Sue Coe, this provocative anthology chronicles the distinctive voice of a formidable art critic whose reflections on art, artists, and art criticism constitute an eclectic exploration of the ways in which art and art criticism have influenced contemporary thought and psychology. The book's investigation into the social impact of artwork also reflects on the inner life of the artist.

This compelling anthology chronicles the distinctive voice of one of America's foremost art critics during the past two and a half decades. Donald Kuspit's reflections on art, artists, and art criticism are eclectic, exploring the ways in which art and its criticism have influenced twentieth-century thought and psychology, how the social natures of art and criticism have been impacted by the Postmodern culture industry, and finally what can be done to restore criticism to its rightful mission: the service of art.

"The real problem of art criticism today is to reconstitute the critical spirit as such," proposes Kuspit. "Then that spirit can be used to reconstruct authenticity in art-to reconceive art in terms of its deepest intentions, forgotten even by art itself."

Redeeming Art scrutinizes the aesthetic developments of the last quarter of the century; from Abstract Expressionism to the latest permutation of Postmodernism; from Willem de Kooning to Andy Warhol to Sue Coe. The essays include: "Philosophy and Art: Affinities in an Arranged Marriage," "The Psychoanalytic Construction of the Artist," "Art Is Dead: Long Live Aesthetic Management," "Deadministering Art," and "Warhol's Catholic Dance with Death." In a concluding section, interviews with Donald Kuspit by Suzanne Ramljak, Barbara Bennish, and Mark Van Proyen reveal his candid and poignant meditations on art criticism and his own development as a scholar.

About The Author
Donald Kuspit is an art critic and a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the 1997 Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to Visual Arts from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. He is a 1983 recipient of the College Art Association's prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. He is a contributing editor at Artforum, Sculpture, and New Art Examiner magazines, the editor of Art Criticism, and the editor of a series on American Art and Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press. He has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. An author of numerous articles, exhibition reviews, and catalog essays, Kuspit has written more than twenty books, including Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries (Allworth Press), Daniel Brush, Joseph Raffael, Chihuly, and Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Gardes. He lives in New York City.

Allworth Press books written by Donald Kuspit: The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art

Donald Kuspit, a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, is the author of more than twenty books and numerous essays. He has earned fellowships from, among others, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in New York.