Michael Fried (art critic)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael Fried is an influential Modernist art critic and art historian. He is currently the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Art History at Johns Hopkins University, United States.

Fried's preeminent contribution to art historical discourse involved the debate over the origins and development of modernism. Among Fried, this debate's interlocutors include other distinguished theorist/critics such as, Clement Greenberg, Ken Moffett, T. J. Clark (historian), and Rosalind Krauss. Since the early 1970s, he has also been close to philosopher Stanley Cavell. In his essay, Art and Objecthood, published in 1967, he suggested that Minimalism had betrayed Modernism's exploration of the medium by becoming emphatic about its own materiality as to deny the viewer a proper aesthetic experience. Minimalism (or "literalism" as Fried called it) offered an experience of "theatricality" rather than "presentness"; it left the viewer in his or her ordinary world. Art and Objecthood remains among the most important pieces on 20th century American art, and is still ardently debated.

In more recent years, Fried has written several long and complex histories of modern art, most famously on Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, and painting in the late 18th century.

• Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
• Manet's Modernism
• Courbet's Realism
• Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin
• Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane

Fried is also a poet, having written The Next Bend in the Road, Powers, and To the Center of the Earth.

[edit] See also

His website at Johns Hopkins University [1]