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Donald Kuspit's Achievement as an ArtCritic During the 1970sDavid Craven aa Art & Art History Department MSC04 2560 1 , University of NewMexico , Albuquerque, NM, 87131-000, USAPublished online: 28 May 2009.

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Donald Kuspit’s Achievement as an Art

Critic During the 1970s

David Craven

The January 1974 issue of Artforum carried

Kuspit’s first article on contemporary art, titled

»A Phenomenological Approach to Artistic In-

tention.« (He had previously written on art

history and philosophy.) Readers quickly di-

vided, saying two things: (1) He is unreadable;

(2) He is worth reading because embedded in his

uncompromising language are some of the most

worthwhile thoughts on art.

Rudolf Baranik, Artforum (1984)1

TO SIMPLIFY IS TO BETRAY, or so claimed T.W.

Adorno, for whom philosophy was a form of

critical thinking that resisted all paraphrase.

This guiding thread for theoretical engage-

ment is also a key tactic for approaching the

distinctive art criticism, art historical analysis,

and philosophical critiques of Donald Kuspit,

one of the half dozen most recognized art

critics from the US in the 20th century.

Symptomatic of his broad ranging approach

is how Kuspit’s writings also demonstrate a

nimble negotiation through densely stratified

fields typical of the paratactic studies of the

Frankfurt School. In fact, the first of Kuspit’s

three Ph.D.s was earned in Philosophy under

Adorno at Frankfurt University in 1963 ,

before he then gained another in Art History

at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in

1971 , and an equivalent in Psychoanalysis

from New York University’s School of Med-

icine in the 1990s.2 What then are some of

the signal attributes that have linked his

writings to those of Adorno, while also

establishing Kuspit’s prominent place among

Western art critics since the early 1970s?

First, there is Kuspit’s capacity for critically

engaging with profound issues on several

fronts at once: aesthetic, philosophical, his-

torical, and psychoanalytic, among others.

This multi-lateral approach disallows any

linear presentation of his over-arching career

as a mere sequential progression of different

critical approaches with a teleological im-

petus. Second, there is Kuspit’s refusal to

allow any issue to be examined from a single

vantage point without its converse being

brought into play, featuring several analytical

twists along the way. This approach is

articulated by an unusual prose style that

reaches back and forth from the most rarified

realms of abstract thought to sharply concrete

observations about specific art works. Third,

there is Kuspit’s ability to produce aphoristic

philosophy, while not reducing philosophy to

a mere glib list of aphorisms. Thus, there is

frequently a rare fit between memorable one-

liners and an irreducible depth at odds with

one-dimensional claims. Finally, there is

Kuspit’s skill at using a type of formal analysis

that does not devolve into mainstream form-

alism. His approach leads instead in another

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direction through deft formal analysis, in

order to address how form in art is a mode

of sensory articulation, not just the formal

manifestation of pre-existing conceptual

knowledge. This thwarts any effort by the

mind to colonize what Merleau-Ponty called

the »lived body« as a perceptual ingress into

aesthetic experience. In this sense, Kuspit’s art

criticism has continually been at odds with

the puritanical character of all »purely«

cerebral approaches to explaining the body’s

sensory encounter with art.

Accordingly, Kuspit insists on art’s sensu-

ous experience, yet he also addresses the

cognitive knowledge conveyed by means of

the art object. This in turn also entails the

diverse ways whereby it is mediated. Like his

mentor Adorno, Kuspit has an uncommon

talent for giving the screw of interpretative

insight yet one more dialectical move even

when no further explanatory twists seem

possible. Along these lines, Kuspit is often

able to rotate the object of study in such a way

that what appeared to be a problem, even an

impasse, from one angle turns into the

starting point for a new advance on a very

different plane of analysis. A common over-

sight of art historians, critics, and artists who

dismiss Kuspit’s recent position in The End of

Art (2004), on, say, the current institutiona-

lization of Marcel Duchamp, is that these

adversaries are unaware of a basic hermeneu-

tic point. To engage with Kuspit in a serious

way, one must know various other »inter-

textual« essays by Kuspit himself that stake

out rather different positions, so as to grasp

his broader view of Duchamp’s import at

various moments, with each being subject to

secondary historical amendment.3

Unlike most other art critics, Kuspit does

not launch any critique of a key artist that

merely showcases a position for all seasons. As

such, negative conclusions at one juncture are

qualified or complimented with affirmative

stances in other instances. This means that

Kuspit’s vantage point(s) can only be grasped

with any depth as the dynamic interplay of

several different critical explications that do

not permit each other to terminate either in the

latest jargon or in political correctness for

»true believers«. Contrary to most other critics

and philosophers, Kuspit does not have one

overriding philosophical agenda in his art

criticism, whether structuralist, post-structur-

alist, semiological, psychoanalytic, post-colo-

nial or even phenomenological. Rather he

advances various methodological concerns

involving all of the above and they play off of

each other to varying degrees. An interesting,

indeed instructive, way to locate Kuspit’s key

place in the art world is to recall what one of his

colleagues said about his impact on Artforum

around 1974 when Greenbergian orthodoxy

ruled largely unchallenged in that publication

after its foundation in 1962 . The historic shift

that occurred in art criticism during the 1970s,

along with Kuspit’s newfound prominence,

was aptly summed up by fellow critic Carter

Ratcliff:

[P]eople who came next [at Artforum], like

Donald Kuspit, are involved with nuance and

subtlety and sort of weblike complexities which

aren’t really conducive to utterances made in a

strong authoritarian voice. I’m sure they have

their authoritarian impulses like everyone else,

but they don’t write in an authoritarian style.

Kuspit’s thoughts are so labyrinthine in a way

and his conclusions are so shaded and qualified

that you can’t really sloganize them the way you

can sloganize the formalist kind of argument.4

Concomitant with his anti-sloganeering

approach to art criticism are a revealing set

of distinctions. Let us quote Kuspit himself on

the general difference between art criticism, as

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he envisions it, and either philosophy or

theory in the mainstream sense:

Philosophy generates theories that seem to

stand on their own, and are then »applied« to

practice. Criticism understands theory as part

of practice, and subsumes both into experience.

Criticism begins with a responsibility to experi-

ence, moves to awareness of practice, and ends

with theory that seems to clarify the depth with

which a particular practice is experienced.

Criticism is more than either . . . It’s not that

I have no desire for one [theory] � everyone

wants a true model � but it is part of being a

critic to question desire . . . Also, I think the

wish for one true model reflects anxiety about

the abundance and complexity of art today. It is

a kind of arrogance masking fear of engulf-

ment.5

The consequence for Kuspit’s writings is

something singular: his relentlessly theoretical

approach is accompanied by a suppleness of

concrete insight, a sensitivity to the sensuous

aspects of art, that is rare even among those

who distrust theory in the name of empirical

study. Not surprisingly, Kuspit’s best essays

are complex, but not convoluted. Through a

searching process of disentanglement, he

helps us to recall forgotten possibilities both

aesthetically and socially, while also excavat-

ing the recent past psychoanalytically. This

salutary jogging of our memory is accom-

plished by thawing-out or de-reifying analy-

tical approaches that have congealed into

opacity or well-spoken conformity, whatever

the art work being analyzed and regardless of

the culture from which it comes. In contrast

to the new orthodoxies in the art world,

Kuspit has stated:

There no longer seems to be one dominant,

uniquely relevant theory, or much common

ground between different theories . . . Every

such model is a kind of intellectual totalitar-

ianism, masquerading as an intellectual utopia.

So, I feel free to use them all, discretely I hope,

as so many facets in a Cubist collage, each

made ambiguous by the company of its neigh-

bor. One hopes that there’s some coherence in

the picture I create, but it is not binding, and its

ground can shift.6

The rise of New Left Art History

in the 1960s and 70s, and a

phenomenological approach to art

Since the 1960s, when he emerged as a force

in both philosophy and aesthetics, Kuspit has

written over thirty books and hundreds of

articles, review essays, and reviews. These

publications have dealt with a plethora of

concerns in a multi-causal manner. The

expansive progression they demonstrate

includes at least four major periods in a

methodological sense, yet none of these new

phases has signaled a mere terminal point for

all other approaches that preceded them.

These different methodological moments

with their clusters of shifting theoretical

positions in his four-decade career as an art

critic and philosopher will be addressed here.

If we consider the sine qua non founda-

tional strains of the »New Art History« as

these tendencies arose in the 1970s in the

context of a generalized student radicalism,

then a striking observation emerges. Kuspit

was one of the very first, and he remains one

of the most probing, practitioners of the

cluster of methodological shifts that mark

off new left art history � and a concomitant

new art criticism in the New York art world.

From reception theory grounded in social

history and the immanent ideological cri-

tiques of the Frankfurt School to phenomen-

ology and psychoanalysis, Donald Kuspit

often led the way in theory within the

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Anglo-American art world during the 1970s

and 1980s.

After having finished his doctorate under

Adorno in Germany in the mid-1960s, which

led to his first book entitled The Philosophical

Life of the Senses (1969) � with its obvious

debt to Adorno’s Minima Moralia � Kuspit

went on to write a second Ph.D. dissertation

in art history at the University of Michigan,

Ann Arbor. Completed in 1971 , his doctoral

thesis, Durer and the Northern Critics, 1502*1572 , was unlike any other study in this area

for several reasons.7 In it, Kuspit used critical

theory to inaugurate a disciplinary redirec-

tion from the restrictive mainstream focus on

artistic production to a sharp new concentra-

tion on art’s reception. Moreover, Kuspit’s

methodological renovation actually occurred

simultaneously with three other outstanding

books often singled out as »first« in this

regard, namely, the magisterial book by

Michael Baxandall in 1972 on Quattrocentro

Florence and the two studies by T.J. Clark in

1973 on 19th century France.8

Kuspit spoke to the innovativeness of his

own approach when, in the foreword to his

1971 dissertation, he noted as follows:

The thesis analyzes the major conceptions of

Durer in sixteenth century Northern European

criticism . . . Melanchthon [for example] had a

special relation to Durer, valuing his art . . . as

the best vehicle for Protestant introspection . . .

In the course of the study there are discussions

of the use of the epigram as an instrument of

criticism in the Renaissance; the complexities

of the meaning of imitation . . . and [the] use of

principles to produce art . . . The method of the

thesis is to analyze exhaustively all critical

notices of Durer . . . [A presupposition is that]

ultimate understanding of the formal, stylistic

element of an artist’s oeuvre is impossible

without knowing how it was viewed by his

contemporaries.9

Before refocusing so intensely on 20th

century art and thought in the early 1970s,

Kuspit did author a series of articles on Durer,

social history, and the philosophy of art that

still remain exemplary in the field. In 1975 ,

for example, he demonstrated how Durer’s

rather militant commitment to the most

radical wing of the Reformation manifested

itself ideologically in the indifferent visual

idiom he employed to portrait the unsympa-

thetic emotional detachment of Erasmus as

well as other Humanists.1 0 Earlier, in 1972 /

73 , Kuspit had published »Durer’s Scientific

Side«, an article in which he developed the

following contentions:

Richter observes that in the Renaissance »no

clear distinction was made between art, science,

and philosophy«, so that it seems the practice of

one would lead to the practice of the others . . .

Richter’s remark is made in the context of

surprise at how near Leonardo’s »conception

of what true science should be came to modern

standards«. Can the same be said of Durer?

The question is all the more pertinent because

of the self-contradictory character of Durer’s

art. On the one hand, it is constituted by

precision in the depiction of nature, sympto-

matic of a desire for objectivity. On the other

hand, it is characterized by intense

religiosity . . . The sword to cut this Gordian

knot is the recognition that Durer’s science is

not modern and experimental, but conforms to

the classical ideal of science as the disclosure of

intelligibility � the demonstration of stable

order in transient appearance, of conceptual

wholeness in piecemeal perception.1 1

In making this observation, Kuspit also

distanced himself from the reigning view of

Durer maintained by Panofsky, »who would

like art to be more rational than it is«, thus

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causing him to overlook »the superficiality of

Durer’s measuring rationality in contrast to

his deep emotional disturbance at the

dreamed event [of apocalypse]«.1 2 Similarly,

Kuspit noted that »Panofsky’s abhorrence of

expressionism fits in with his indifference to

the psychological character of Durer’s art«.1 3

It was to a fundamental rethinking of

expressionism and abstract art per se that

Kuspit turned next in a set of articles during

the early 1970s. These articles on Kandinsky,

Delaunay, Malevich, and Mondrian as »uto-

pian socialists« were without precedent in art

history and they remain touchstones in the

life of the discipline. Recent work on anti-

colonial and transnational »Cosmopolitan

Modernisms«, along with »Discrepant

Abstraction«, by post-colonial scholars like

Kobena Mercer and Partha Mitter have now

begun to consolidate Kuspit’s earlier work

here.1 4

The problem confronted by Kuspit in 1970

when he revisited the issue of »abstract art«

was how to counter not only the mainstream

interpretation of Alfred Barr (and later of

Clement Greenberg), but also that of their

main critic, Meyer Schapiro. Kuspit began his

radically divergent explanation as follows:

Utopian protest, by which I mean objection

not to social and political particulars but to

general conditions of existence and the values

which sustain them, is one of the major

motivating forces behind Kandinsky’s early

production. The concept is derived from Engel’s

account of utopian socialists, who »do not claim

to emancipate a particular class to begin with,

but all humanity at once« . . . Engels accuses

the utopian socialists of being historically naıve

and thus ineffective; but what is historically

naıve may be aesthetically sophisticated, what

is inadequately aware of the given world may

be a sufficient condition for a new art . . . As for

Kandinsky’s presumed anti-socialism [accord-

ing to Meyer Schapiro and Alfred Barr], it must

be subsumed in the larger discussion of his

protest against self-proclaimed absolute social

orders.1 5

From here, Kuspit moved on to do a highly

innovative analysis of Kandinsky’s art that

built on the artist’s avowed political orienta-

tion as a lifelong anarchist and his corre-

sponding interest (as a former Law Professor

in Russia) in humane and decentralized legal

codes, specifically Russian Peasant Law as

opposed to the hegemonic Roman Law of

the Russian Empire. Kandinsky sought to

arrive at a less rule-bound and more personal

conception of social justice � and at a less

rigid and more spontaneous conception of

artistic practice. For him, individual sponta-

neity was an ontological category upon which

a more just and inclusive society would be

predicated. Kuspit noted:

That Kandinsky’s appreciation of Russian

peasant law, with its flexible attitude towards

the human agent, is crucial for his conception of

painting, is demonstrated by the fact that his

Reminiscences begin and end with footnotes on

this subject. Art, in fact, should emulate

Russian peasant law, in its respect for the

spontaneity of the living artist rather than the

formal modes of traditional art.1 6

Yet, at this point Kuspit switched gears. He

went from explicating the intentionality

behind Kandinsky’s radically dissident con-

ception of art to assessing how far those

intentions were actually realized in his art �and also whether Kandinsky’s art ever trig-

gered the revolutionary transformation of

society more generally. Here, though, Kuspit

emphasized again the circumstances of artis-

tic production based at least partially in

artistic intentions. He did so to examine the

gaps between visionary artistic aims and

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constraining audience responses to utopian

visions. In his measured critique of Kandins-

ky’s accomplishment, Kuspit wrote as follows:

[A]t the second stage Kandinsky’s claim for

the independence of art is not justified, but

merely asserted, and remains incomplete if not

generally inadequate . . . At this stage, the

ideological content of the second stage is fused

with the first stage’s concern for spontaneity,

and the transcendent experiences of the second

stage become the means of penetrating the

unified realms of art, science, nature, and

society . . . The utopianism of the final stage is

extreme, and in a sense critical protest is

dissolved in its religious rapture.1 7

Yet, Kuspit nonetheless concluded from this

move that:

Kandinsky in effect introduces the Coperni-

can Revolution into painting, i.e., the insistence

that the object conform to the subject, rather

than vice versa, as was traditionally the

case . . . In sum, Kandinsky makes a penetrat-

ing protest against the idea of absolute art. He

shows that abstract art is in a sense art’s self-

criticism; its rejections of its previous claims of

being able to offer an eternal art.1 8

Of note here are the depth of intellectual

engagement and a matching sensitivity to

concrete experience used by Kuspit to rethink

abstract art both in this essay and in several

others that followed. In a 1972 essay on

»Delaunay’s Rationale for Peinture Pure,

1909�1915«, Kuspit returned to the theme

of abstract art along with its diverse links to a

»transcendental purpose« in both pictorial

and social terms.1 9 By charting the trajectory

of the artistic practice used by the French

painter, Kuspit demonstrated that Delaunay

was quite aware of peinture pure’s »intermin-

gling of artistic and philosophical motiva-

tion«, yet without any explicit content.

Indeed, Kuspit then concluded that what

caused Delaunay to abandon non-figurative

art was the artist’s »implicit awareness of the

conflict between the perceptual and the

conceptual in non-objective art, and his

uncertain reconciliation of the two«.2 0

Thus, Delaunay’s peculiar type of abstract

art was basically »an interlude between a style

preoccupied with structural considerations

and a style striving for allegorical import«.2 1

Subsequently, Kuspit advanced a different

analysis of the conception of abstract art

underlying the work of Kasimir Malevich, a

partisan of the Bolshevik Revolution. As

Kuspit demonstrated, the oeuvre of Malevich

went through a spectrum of permutations.

These shifts encompassed seven different

changes in inflexion, if not direction, between

1910 and the early 1920s. In »Malevich’s

Quest for Unconditional Creativity« (1974),

Kuspit traced the shifting relationship in the

figure/field (or figure/ground) relationship

along tight formal lines. In doing so his

analysis reminds us of how Mikhail Bakhtin

(a Russian contemporary of Malevich) could

rightly observe that there were various types

of formalism and that at least one of them

was compatible with interpretations on the

left.2 2

In tracing Malevich’s Suprematism to its

culminating point in the famous White on

White canvas from 1918 , Kuspit contended

that the »field converts, from the backdrop or

setting of the form, explicitly into its

ground«. As such, this paradigmatic phase

of Malevich’s painting conveys something

singular: »No longer simply the site of form,

it is the field that gives the figure decisive

presence«.2 3 Prior to this insight, Kuspit

showed how Malevich’s pre-revolutionary

art images depicting the Russian peasant

signified a »peasant fatalism � [the] sign of

his belief that nature is his fate« and thus also

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indirectly the artist’s own sense of pessimism

on the eve of World War I.2 4 Yet, this impasse

was broken both in personal ways and in

world historical terms. The result in Male-

vich’s corpus was a rapid transition to

»Suprematism’s climax« through a series of

exemplary paintings with »consummate sim-

plicity«. This rare moment of suspended

animation � or utopian resolution � in the

aftermath of the Russian Revolution pro-

duced art works like the oil on canvas White

on White. About it, Kuspit wrote as follows:

The reciprocity of form and field is definitely

asserted: they are shown to be distinct but not

separate, in effect rooted in one another . . .

Form and field differentiate yet fuse, unify yet

declare themselves antithetical to one an-

other . . . The negative nature of the field and

the positive nature of the form are affirmed

through one another . . . The ontological import

of Suprematism acquires new depth, for it is

created by a union of ultimate opposites . . .

Through Suprematism as well as Dadaism

[and its iconoclasm] art acquires the philoso-

phical dimension without which it is nothing

but a matter of style.2 5

After this culminating stage in his artistic

practice, Malevich then indulged in a series

of pictorial retreats long before the onset of

Stalin-era strictures made the earlier work

»too impractical« for Soviet society. A type

of populism infused Malevich’s paintings

around 1920 as the tried-and-true cross

motif, with its standard figure/field relation-

ship, became a defining configuration of his

paintings. Kuspit’s critique at this point

sharpened noticeably, as when he maintained

that: »Malevich’s cross works are a shortcut

to a sense of eternity . . . They are a false

climax . . . They give an answer where other

Suprematist works raise a question«. As

such, this body of paintings by Malevich

constituted a »regression to ordinary repre-

sentation and conventional meaning«.2 6

At this critical juncture, Kuspit had

obviously arrived at a set of views that were

fundamentally at odds with all the main-

stream positions in the New York artworld. In

particular, he delineated how there were

multiple conceptions of abstract art, none of

which really conformed to Greenberg’s domi-

nant conception of medium purification as

the single motor of all modernist abstractions

in the West. In addition, Kuspit had already

concluded that the ascent of the »Washington

Color Field School« had led to the retroactive

political lobotomy of abstract art as a whole.

With a pointedly counter-canonical vantage

point that now seems entirely justified

(although it was unpopular at the time),

Kuspit wrote as follows in 1970 during the

heyday of Greenberg:

All this is part of the institutionalization of

abstract art . . . It thus ignores the intention of

non-objectivity to protest against

rigidification . . . [and] against totalitarianism

in art . . . Today’s abstractionists have lost the

core of abstract art.2 7

If the then ascendant Washington Color

Field School had lost the critical dimension

crucial to contesting the regressive features of

Western culture and Clement Greenberg’s

increasingly rightwing art criticism had

become hegemonic, then an obvious question

arose. Which artists and what type of art

criticism could revivify the critical spirit

around 1970 , during the structural crisis of

capitalism connected, among other things, to

US military intervention abroad and the civil

rights movement at home?

Kuspit had a ready response, if also a

protracted one, to both queries. As for artists

within the New York School whose work built

upon (rather than suppressed) the critical

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spirit of the dissident early 20th century

avant-garde art, Kuspit wrote about a cluster

of artists in various media who did just that:

Richard Serra among the Post-Minimalists,

Sol Le Witt among the Conceptual Artists,

Rudolf Baranik among the post-AE abstrac-

tionists, Leon Golub among the post-AE Neo-

Expressionists and Nancy Spero, as well as

May Stevens, among the first generation

Feminists. Moreover, Kuspit came to admire

and to defend, albeit with some qualifica-

tions, the radicalizing extra-aesthetic impact

of Joseph Beuys in Europe. In each case � and

they were often quite disparate ones leading

in competing directions � Kuspit located a

resourceful visual resistance to the mind-

numbing institutionalization of art in the

US by the status quo: from Serra’s reconfi-

guration of art’s relation to labor and Sol

LeWitt’s reductio ad absurdum usage of

»rational« structures against instrumental

rationality, through Rudolf Baranik’s sobering

Napalm Elegies (1967�1972) about the tragic

invasion of Vietnam, to the uncompromising

pictorial broadsides against patriarchy

launched in the paintings of Nancy Spero or

May Stevens and, finally, thee figurative art of

Benny Andrews with its basis in the popular

culture of the African�American community.

The essays in which Kuspit’s critical

explications for these positions appeared are

now foundational texts of 1970s art criticism,

and they include, among many others, such

articles as: »Richard Serra’s City Piece«, Arts

Magazine (January 1975) plus »Richard

Serra: Utopian Constructivist«, Arts Magazine

(November 1980); »Sol LeWitt: The Look of

Thought«, Art in America (Fall 1975); »Leon

Golub’s Assassins: An Anatomy of Violence«,

Art in America (Summer 1975); Rudolf

Baranik’s »Uncanny Awakening From the

Nightmare of History«, Arts Magazine

(February 1976), [the Cover Article for this

issue]; »Nancy Spero at AIR Gallery«, Art in

America (Summer 1975) plus Art Journal

(Winter 1976 /77); and »May Stevens at

Lerner Heller«, Art in America (Spring

1977).2 8

Yet, on the other hand, Kuspit was implac-

able in his critical scrutiny of Minimalism,

Pop Art, and Post-Minimalism as general

movements, about each of which he was

deeply ambivalent. While using a philosophi-

cal depth then largely without precedent in

the history of US art criticism, Kuspit

authored a stringent dissection of, say, Green-

berg’s Anthony Caro or Michael Fried’s Frank

Stella, as well as of certain works (but

definitely all) by Robert Morris. An especially

hard hit target was positivism, as it surfaced

in artistic declarations about supposedly self-

evident experience, such as in the tautological

maxim: »What you see is what you see«.2 9 As

Kuspit demonstrated:

Minimalism, however, strips art of more

than its ideational allusions to experience . . .

much on the order of the new poverty of

philosophy Marcuse accuses [the early] Witt-

genstein of creating . . . the implicit conformity

to the status quo in the acceptance of ordinary

language as the arbiter of thought.3 0

About Pop Art, Kuspit took contrary posi-

tions, depending on the terms of reception in

each case. On the one hand, he addressed

negatively the popular reception that simply

treated Pop Art as a flat and affirmative

»reflection« of all that is possible or desired.

Such a view made art’s signification deeply

complicit with a ruling order that denied any

alternative social vision.3 1 On the other hand,

Kuspit bestowed considerable critical praise on

what he identified as »Warholism«. Through

its voluntary approximation to the »death of

the artist«, Warholism placed the art critic and

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the spectator in the troubling position of

having to be self-critical about their own

political standpoints in assigning meaning to

such »mute« or seemingly positionless art.3 2

About Robert Morris’s notorious poster for

one of his own exhibitions of post-minimalist

art works, in which the artist had himself

photographed in a Nazi helmet while also

flexing chains, Kuspit had some searching

comments to make in an essay entitled

»Authoritarian Abstraction« (1977). Kuspit

singled out a paradox central to this art,

namely, that, »Abstract art today defines itself

exclusively in terms of its objecthood . . . but

extra-art experience returns to haunt formal-

ism and lead it to self-dissolution«.3 3 He then

built on insights by both Walter Benjamin

and Habermas of the Frankfurt School

(neither of whom had been invoked earlier

by US art critics) before analyzing the Morris

poster more expansively:

[Robert] Morris’s self-portrait thus sum-

marizes the paradox of authoritarian style,

especially because it shows Morris as both

master and slave. It is well-known that the

core of Hegel’s treatment of consciousness in the

Phenomenology of Mind, and of Marx’s treat-

ment of the bourgeois and proletariat, is the

master-slave dialectic . . . Morris both exhausts

and absolutizes his narcissism by presenting

himself simultaneously as [each] . . . Much as

the master cripples society as a whole by

oppressing the slave, . . . so in authoritarian

abstraction pure form cripples art as a whole

by repressing expressive meaning.3 4

In a related vein, Kuspit also launched a

multi-front critique of mainstream art criti-

cism. He did so rather surprisingly with the

point d’appui of addressing how Clement

Greenberg, a self-avowed neo-Kantian, mis-

used Kant. Dramatic notice of things to come

was served in 1971 by Kuspit’s article »The

Illusion of the Absolute in Abstract Art«.3 5 In

a manifesto-like opening, Kuspit invoked

Kant in a fresh manner at once consistent

with the reading of the Frankfurt School and

inconsistent with the orthodox formalism of

Greenberg. This important rethinking of Kant

predated a similar move by Michel Foucault

around 1980 in his essay »What Is Enlight-

enment?«.3 6 Kuspit’s article in 1970 began as

follows:

My model is Kantian; I refer to »dialectical

illusion« in the first Critique. Illusion here is an

extension of understanding beyond experience.

The critique of the consequent content is in

effect Kant’s final demonstration that neither

sensibility nor understanding »may be given

preference«: »Thoughts without content are

empty; intuitions without concepts are

blind« . . . The destruction of reciprocity be-

tween sensibility and understanding destroys

the world of experience.3 7

Pop art and the death of the

conventional art critic

With the stage set for advancing a counter-

cultural reading of Kant in the face of New York

art world orthodoxy, Kuspit then published

one of the most relentlessly systematic assess-

ments ever written about the state of art

criticism and its divergent practices. Only a

half dozen essays about art criticism in the

history of the US can be said to rival in depth,

range, or timeliness Kuspit’s 1974 article for

Artforum entitled »A Phenomenological Ap-

proach to Artistic Intention«.3 8 More a mono-

graph than an essay, this article is marked by

concision and intricacy for all its notorious

density. Seldom has an essay about art criti-

cism featured such a sweeping overview of

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both the presuppositions underlying any

critical approach to art and the pre-conditions

for any contemporary reception of it.

Moreover, and perhaps most importantly,

Kuspit’s essay helped to bring US art criticism

in line with certain discourses of Western

Marxism, especially as discussed by Perry

Anderson in his indispensable book on the

topic.3 9 In distinguishing what he called

»Classical Marxism« (Marx and Engels

through Luxemburg and Lenin) from »Wes-

tern Marxism« (Lukacs, Korsch, and Gramsci

through Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse,

Lefebvre, and Althusser), Anderson enumer-

ated several symptomatic differences between

the two sets of Marxian thinkers. First and

foremost was the emphasis by the latter group

less on the terms of social praxis than on

»epistemological principles«. The latter were

crucial for determining when and how to act

in a Western society that, from the 1930s

onward, gained immensely in ideological as

well as infrastructural complexity.

All of these latter thinkers, especially from

1960 onward, agreed on at least one over-

riding point. To quote Anderson,

the common assumption of virtually all was

that the preliminary task of theoretical research

within Marxism was to disengage the rules of

social enquiry discovered by Marx . . . [so that]

Western Marxism became a prolonged and

intricate Discourse on Method.4 0

Accordingly, even seemingly unrelated

thinkers like Foucault (a student of Althusser

and admirer of the Frankfurt School) or

Derrida (who wrote a book about Marxism

in the early 1990s) were in fact very much a

part of the stirring debates about epistemol-

ogy within Western Marxism.4 1 Ironically

perhaps, even Foucault’s well-known discus-

sion of the »discursive field« was itself

grounded in the discourse on method of

Western Marxism(s).

Without any doubt, the primary figure in

the Anglo-American art world who first

shifted the focus of art criticism to a compar-

able discourse on method was Donald Kuspit.

He in turn enjoyed direct philosophical links

to such Western Marxists as Adorno, Mar-

cuse, and Walter Benjamin through the

Frankfurt School. More than anyone else, it

was Kuspit who began what subsequently

came to be known as »American Philosophi-

cal Art Criticism«. Later Rosalind Krauss

emerged in a notable way within this same

tradition of philosophical art criticism, as did

Richard Wollheim, Arthur Danto and David

Carrier � the former in relation to French

structuralism and the latter three in the

tradition of Anglo-American analytical phi-

losophy.4 2

Kuspit understood that »critical theory«

(the term coined by the Frankfurt School in

1937) was less a method per se, than a means

of engaging critically with all other philoso-

phical methods. Thus, he sought a specific

methodological approach that was premised

first and foremost on being self-reflexive. One

such method in the 1970s and 80s was

phenomenology. That philosophical orienta-

tion first emerged in the writings of German

thinker Edmund Husserl during the immedi-

ate aftermath of the First World War. The

mentor of Heidegger, Husserl would later

have a notable impact on the phenomenolo-

gical approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

(the author who invented the term »Western

Marxism«).4 3 Husserl’s new conception of

philosophy was itself a response to the two

unacceptable schools of thought then ascen-

dant in the West: positivism (or scientism) on

the one hand, with its sterile belief in just

recording »the facts«, and, on the other, the

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various types of intuitionism extending from

Benedetti Croce to Henri Bergson, with their

single-minded anti-rationalism. Neither tra-

dition seemed capable of re-grounding phi-

losophy in a critical or self-reflexive manner.

Husserl started by doubting any recourse to

the »natural attitude« � the supposedly

»commonsensical belief« by »ordinary peo-

ple« from whatever culture � that objects like

art works simply exist independently in the

external world of any human perceiver. As

Husserl observed, »common sense« empiri-

cism is unfortunately not bothered by episte-

mological doubt concerning how we know

things. Nor is it naıve about the role our mind

plays in mediating all knowledge of objects,

whether we reflect on that projective role or

not. Accordingly, Husserl posited a view of

perceived objects and perceiving subjects as

an interdependent relationship, so that one

could not exist entirely independent of the

other. As such, the act of thought in relation

to perception and the object being perceived

are mutually dependent. Consciousness went

from being a passive registration of objects to

being an active constitutive force that »in-

tends« to engage with experience. In this way,

Husserl sought to focus on how we know what

we know by means of a »phenomenological

reduction« that excludes from consideration

what is not »immanent« to consciousness

itself in the processing of experience.4 4

Unlike positivism or empiricism, phenom-

enology asked not about this or that form of

knowing, but instead about the general con-

ditions that make human knowledge of

experience possible to begin with. Phenom-

enology was unconvinced by the random,

fragmentary encounter with particular objects

privileged by empiricism. Rather, phenomen-

ology approached experience as being a

relational field constituted by the perceiving

subject, who both unintentionally projects

onto and also intentionally records any

experience. Conversely, phenomenology dis-

puted the possibility of any immediate, un-

reflective intuition into the metaphysical

»essence« of objects in the external world,

as if pre-rational insight were possible. Nor

did Husserl contend like Kant and other

philosophical idealists that »universal men-

tal« structures essential to the human mind

solved the problem of how we can know

things assumed to be independent of human

intellect.

For our purposes here, it is significant to

recall how, in 1924 , T.W. Adorno’s Ph.D.

dissertation on Husserl addressed the much

debated contribution of phenomenology.4 5

For Adorno, Husserl was important for

restoring the constitutive role of the human

subject, even as the German phenomenologist

was also guilty of creating a new form of

methodological idealism that first posited a

relational view of knowledge and then im-

plausibly over-emphasized the projective role

of the subject at the expense of the world of

objects. He accomplished the reclamation of

agency for the subject in perception, but only

by making the status of objects in the outside

world so dependent that empiricism and

positivism were simply turned on their heads.

The critical question for Adorno � as for

Kuspit � was to arrive at a constitutive subject

that did not dissolve all knowledge into mere

subjective experience, but rather posited a

dynamic interdependence between subjects

and objects, that is, between consciousness

and its actual conditions of existence.

About his introduction of phenomenology

into Anglo-American art criticism during the

1970s, Kuspit stated as follows in a subse-

quent interview:

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One could say that my interest in phenomen-

ology evolved from Adorno’s idea of the »dialec-

tic of appearances« . . . My understanding of

phenomenology is in part idiosyncratic, and in

part grounded in Husserl’s sense of the self-

reflexive subject. In any case, once the impor-

tance of the subject was acknowledged as the

object of its own thought or reflection, the rest

followed logically from that. I began by realizing

that art was continually relational . . . [that]

both the artist and the critically engaged viewer

of art are equally creative. Each side needs the

other.4 6

Kuspit’s »Phenomenological Approach to

Artistic Intention« of 1974 was nothing less

than a manifesto about the necessity for art

criticism to become far more rigorously self-

critical than any doctrine of medium purity

and its interpretative competitors would

permit. This systemic discourse on method

began with an opening passage that signaled

what was in store for the reader:

The approach is tripartite, each part a stage

transcending its predecessor: (1) artistic inten-

tion as the matter-of-fact ground of art, in the

same way in which, as Husserl describes it, the

»foundation of naıve-objectivistic science« is

something taken for granted; (2) the subjecti-

vization of the perception of art through the

deliberate introduction of a systematic doubt of

the presumably self-evident objectivity of its

ground � the doubt is designed to counteract the

self-evidence � issuing in a phenomenological

reduction of art . . .; (3) the reviewing, under

the auspices of the phenomenological epoche of

artistic intention as »that ultimate originality

which, once apparent, apodictically masters the

will« to create art.4 7

From there, Kuspit went on to make two

key points about his new method for practi-

cing art criticism as a heightened discourse on

method: First, phenomenology’s »aim is to

uncover the constitutive consciousness of any

phenomenon by transcending through doubt

the •natural attitude¶ to it, which takes its

experience naively and unquestioningly«.

And second, •»phenomenological dis-

connexion¶ or transcendental doubt is the

self-reflexive action of consciousness in pur-

suit of its own style of being«.4 8

Armed with this type of philosophical fire-

power, Kuspit then targeted a whole series of

critical approaches deficient in self-criticism

about the underlying pre-suppositions for

their own practice. Kuspit shows that Green-

berg’s doctrine of »medium self-conscious-

ness« in fact disallows any thorough-going

self-criticism by a critic who starts with such

an innocently unquestioned foundation. This

failing emerges through assigning all art an

»historically readymade goal«, since such a

gambit eliminates any doubt about its own

assumed concept of art or the ideological

bedrock on which it is predicated. In fact,

Greenberg believed that »objective« standards

of good taste and quality can simply be

extracted in a neutral way from essential

attributes of an art work, independently of

all human subjective. In this sense and others,

his position was pre-Husserlian � and even

non-Kantian, despite Greenberg’s mistaken

claims to the contrary. Accordingly, Green-

berg never moved past a rudimentary »posi-

tivism with a doctrine of historical necessity«

that simply banned all subjectivity as out of

bounds from the first pitch. Yet, as Kuspit

noted, »Thinking about the artistic object

means to recognize that no values can be

assumed to be exclusively essential to art, i.e.,

to constitute it in and of themselves«.4 9

Two other art critics, Leo Steinberg and Max

Kozloff, were able to accommodate subjectiv-

ity and with it uncertainty in a way that

Greenberg could not. These critics thus

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advanced beyond Greenberg’s naıve empiri-

cism toward art criticism taken to the second

power, even if they encountered other difficul-

ties subsequently. To paraphrase Kuspit: Stein-

berg uncovered the uncertain ‘plight’ of art’s

public, much as Kozloff unveiled the anxious

uncertainty of the art critic before unexpected

art work. For Steinberg the predicament of the

public resulted from modernist experimental-

ism and the »anxiety« attendant upon it when

»modern art always projects itself into a twi-

light zone where no values are fixed«.5 0 Yet, as

Kuspit observed, Steinberg then essentialized

artistic practice, just as Greenberg essentialized

the artistic medium, so that in each case self-

reflexivity was aborted. This occurred in the

former instance because: »How such anxiety

[in art] might be constitutive of modernist

self-doubt is uncertain in Steinberg, other than

the fact that it makes self-doubt self-evi-

dent«.5 1

At this point in his critique, Kuspit invoked

a particular usage of the »Marxist point of

view« via the Frankfurt School to demon-

strate how »artistic pluralism« is not neces-

sarily a stock feature of all modern artistic

practices whatever the historical situation.

Rather pluralism is presently a phenomenon

linked to the institutional regulation of

artistic practice through the constant search

for new markets. Kuspit than went on to

conclude that:

The problem does not stop there for the

Marxist, who considers what [Lawrence] Allo-

way calls the art »network« to be a system for

the distribution of bourgeois art commodities,

modeled on a general capitalist system . . . Thus

artistic plurality is an idealistic way of speaking

of buying commodities, [of] disguising an

ideology . . . The »plight« of the critic and the

public is no more than the lingering uncertainty

of the consumer about the inherent value of the

contemporary art commodity [in the market-

place].5 2

Kuspit shifted gears here, though, to avoid

the reductionism easily connected to eco-

nomic determinism and he observed that

even within Marxism: »An argument can

also be made for the opposite point of

view«. Such a labor-theory reading of value

in art could show that value in art is often

found not just in arbitrary market forces, but

also in how labor is invested in the artistic

process. Accordingly, »The amount of work,

conceived in a Hegelian if not strictly

Marxian sense, which an artist puts into a

work becomes crucial if not ultimate in the

determination of its commodity value«.5 3

How did Kozloff advance beyond both

Steinberg’s under-theorized discussion of

public uncertainty and Alloway’s overstated

certitude about the art world network? He did

so by addressing the site of uncertainty for the

art critic, who in turn mediates both sets of

relationships. The site of that uncertainty is

found in the dilemma of how to deal in fresh

post-formalist terms with the artist’s inten-

tions, like those behind Pop Art, in the

aftermath of the Wimsat and Beardsley’s

objections to the »intentional fallacy«.5 4

Faced in 1962 with Andy Warhol and Pop

Art, Kozloff grappled with rethinking the

locus of intentionality not just within the

art work but perhaps somewhere else. As

Kuspit put it, »Kozloff ’s importance to us lies

in his having a more powerful grasp of artistic

intention . . . However, Kozloff finds that his

own rhetoric falls short of comprehending . . .

what he calls a ‘Warholistic’ attitude«.5 5 In

yet another dialectical twist, Kuspit remarked:

The furthest Kozloff goes toward a statement

independent of formalist and evocative methods

is the following: »How, for instance, does one

determine whether what one sees [in Pop Art]

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are contrasts, deliberate oppositions, dramatic

tensions, clever paradoxes, or just plain incon-

sistencies and contradictions? To ask this

question � and I do not see how it can be

avoided � is to inquire of intention.« Kozloff ’s

question is to the point, but he finds no way of

answering it, of determining intention, because

he asks it of the work and not of himself [my

italics].5 6

In conclusion, Kuspit stated that:

Kozloff errs in thinking Warholism amoral. It

puts the spectator in the most »moral« position

imaginable . . . the Warhol artist does the critic

a moral and existential favor by radically

forcing him back upon himself by forcing him

back upon his intentional consciousness of art,

by forcing him to determine what attitudes he

brings to his seeing.5 7

During 1978 /79 Kuspit consolidated on

several occasions the challenging insights of

his tour de force essay in 1974 about art

criticism’s pressing need for self-reflexivity. Of

particular note here are Kuspit’s essays about

dialectical thinking in the work of Meyer

Schapiro, the status of Harold Rosenberg and

Thomas Hess as dialecticians in yet another

sense, and the anti-positivism of Hindu

scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, who penned

a »brilliant critique of the criticism of the

intentional fallacy«.5 8 All of these articles by

Kuspit in turn laid the foundation for his

incisive and unexpected interpretations in

1981 /82 of German Neo-Expressionism. The

ones about Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz,

for example, remain among the most probing

� and the least understood � articles of the

last two decades of the 20th century.

The overwrought polemics surrounding

these essays act even now as impediments to

a lucid comprehension of Kuspit’s interven-

tions on behalf of a »negative dialectic« in art

criticism during the Reagan Era, about which

he was so deeply critical. At the beginning of

the 1980s, though, Kuspit’s methodological

approach shifted towards an increasing use of

psychoanalysis, just as his defense of »critical

subjectivity« in the polemics around German

Neo-Expressionism raised yet again some key

epistemological issues about the nature of

subjectivity per se. This rather different and

often well-known period in his career takes

us, however, beyond the remarkable first

phase of his philosophical criticism that has

been highlighted here.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Dr. Susanne Baackmann

and the Editors of Konsthistorisk tidskrift for

their thoughtful readings and constructive

criticisms of my article.

Endnotes1 . Rudolf Baranik, »Three Books: Alloway, Kuspit,

Lippard«, Artforum, vol. 22 , Summer 1984, p. 81 .

2 . For this and other biographical information about

Kuspit, see the selection of interviews edited by Mark

van Proyen in Donald Kuspit, Redeeming Art: Critical

Reveries, New York, Allworth Press, 2000 , p. 273�312 .

3 . See, for example, Donald Kuspit, »Breakfast of Duch-

ampians«, Contemporanea, vol. 1 , May, 1989 , 68�73 .

4 . Carter Ratliff, »Denouement«, in Challenging Art:

Artforum, 1962-1974 , ed. Amy Newman, New York,

Soho Press, 2000 , p. 464 . See also the praise of Kuspit’s

fresh contribution to Artforum by former editor John

Coplans on p. 384�385 .

5 . Kuspit, Redeeming Art, p. 274�275 .

6 . Ibid.

7 . Donald B. Kuspit, The Philosophical Life of the Senses,

New York, Philosophical Library, 1969 ; and Donald B.

Kuspit, Durer and the Northern Critics, 1502-1572 ,

Unpublished Ph.D Diss., University of Michigan, Ann

Arbor, 1971 .

8 . I refer of course to the following: Michael Baxandall,

Painting & Experience in Fifteen Century Florence,

Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972 ; as well as to T.J.

Clark, Image of the People, London and New York,

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Thames & Hudson, 1973 ; and T.J. Clark, The Absolute

Bourgeois, London and New York, Thames & Hudson,

1973 .

9 . Kuspit, Durer and the Northern Critics, p. 1�3 .

10 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Melanchthon and Durer: The Search

for a Simple Style«, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance

Studies, vol. 3 (1973): 177�202 ; and Donald B. Kuspit,

»Durer and the Lutheran Image«, Art in America, vol.

63 , January/Febuary 1975, p. 56�61 .

11 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Durer’s Scientific Side«, Art Journal,

vol. 32 , Winter 1972 /73 , p. 163�171 .

12 . Ibid.

13 . Ibid.

14 . See Kobena Mercer, ed., Discrepant Abstraction, London

and Cambridge, MA, MIT Press & InIVA, 2006 .

15 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Utopian Protest in Early Abstract

Art«, Art Journal, vol. 29 , Summer 1970, p. 430�431 .

16 . Ibid.

17 . Ibid.

18 . Ibid, p. 435�436 .

19 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Delaunay’s Rationale for Peinture

Pure, 1909-1915«, Art Journal, vol. 34 , Winter 1974 /75 ,

p. 108�114 .

20 . Ibid, p. 108 .

21 . Ibid.

22 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Malevich’s Quest for Unconditioned

Creativity« (1974), reprinted in Donald Kuspit, The

Critic is Artist: The Intentionality of the Art, Ann Arbor,

UMI Research Press, 1984 : 149�160 . For the essay on

different types of formalisms, see: M.M. Bakhtin and

P.N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholar-

ship [1929], trans. A.J. Wehrle, Cambridge, Mass:

Harvard University Press, 1977 .

23 . Ibid, p. 149 .

24 . Ibid, p. 152 .

25 . Ibid, p. 159 .

26 . Ibid, p. 160 .

27 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Utopian Protest in Early Abstract

Art«, p. 436 .

28 . Kuspit, The Critic is Artist.

29 . Donald Kuspit, »Wittgensteinian Aspects of Minimal

Art« [1972], in The Critic is Artist, p. 243�244 .

30 . Ibid, p. 249�250 .

31 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Pop Art: A Reactionary Realism«, Art

Journal, vol. 36 , Fall 1976 , p. 31�37 .

32 . Donald B. Kuspit, »A Phenomenological Approach to

Artistic Intention«, Artforum, vol. 12 , January 1974, p.

49�51 .

33 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Authoritarian Abstraction«, Journal

of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 36 , Fall 1977 , p. 25 .

34 . Ibid, p. 36 .

35 . Donald B. Kuspit, »The Illusion of the Absolute in

Abstract Art«, Art Journal, vol. 31 , Winter 1971 /72 ,

p. 26�30 .

36 . On this shift, see: Michel Foucault, »What is Enlight-

enment?« [c1981], trans. Catherine Porter, in The

Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Robinow, New York, Random

House, 1984 , p. 32�50 . Concerning Foucault’s deep

admiration for the Frankfurt School, see: Michel

Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversation with Duccio

Trombadori [in 1981], trans. R.J. Goldstein and J.

Cascaito, New York, Semiotext(e), 1991 , p. 1 15�130 .

37 . Kuspit, »Illusion of the Absolute«, p. 26 .

38 . Kuspit, »A Phenomenological Approach«, p. 46�53 .

39 . Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism,

London, New Left Books, 1976 .

40 . Ibid, p. 53 .

41 . Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris, Editions Galilee,

1993 .

42 . See, for example, the publications of Richard Wollheim.

43 . On Merleau-Ponty’s defense of »Western Marxism«, see

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et Terreur, Paris,

Editions Gallimard, 1947 : »It is a definite merit of

Marxism and an advance on Western Thought to have

learned to confront ideas with the social formations they

claim to articulate, to compare our perspectives with

others, and to relate our ethics to out politics. Any

defense of the West which forgets these truths is a

mystification». [Translation by John O’Neill for Beacon

Press, Boston, 1969 of Humanism and Terror.]

44 . Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology [1924],

The Hague, Nijhoff, 1964 .

45 . T.W. Adorno, Die Transzendenz des Dinglichen und

Noematischen in Husserls Phanomenologie [1924 , Ph.D.

dissertation], reproduced in T.W. Adorno, Philosophische

Fruhschriften, vol. I, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf

Tiedemann, Framkfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag,

1973 .

46 . Kuspit, »A Phenomenological Approach to Artistic

Intention« [1974], reprinted in The Critic is Artist,

Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1984 , p. 3�24 .

47 . Ibid.

48 . Ibid.

D O N A L D K U S P I T A S A R T C R I T I C 41

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49 . Ibid.

50 . Ibid.

51 . Ibid.

52 . Ibid.

53 . Ibid.

54 . Ibid.

55 . Ibid.

56 . Ibid.

57 . Ibid.

58 . Donald B. Kuspit, »Review Essay: Ananda Coomaras-

wamy, Selected Papers«, The Art Bulletin, vol. 61 ,

September 1979, p. 501�504 .

Summary

Since the 1970s, Donald Kuspit has become

one of the half dozen most internationally

recognized art critics in US history. This has

been due in large part to his uniquely

interdisciplinary approach to analyzing art,

which is in turn grounded in his expertise in

at least three different areas in which he holds

Ph.Ds: philosophy, art history, and, psycho-

analysis. This essay concentrates on the key

methodological shift triggered by him within

the US art world during the 1970s, when

Kuspit introduced into art criticism a use of

critical theory, following in the tradition of

his mentor Theodor Adorno, and a usage of

phenomenology. As such, Kuspit also empha-

sized in a novel way the importance of

reception theory over any exclusive focus on

the site of artistic production. This move and

others based in an inter-disciplinary approach

help to explain his key contribution to the

New Art History in the Anglo-American art

world, as well as his significance to the

emergence of a new type of philosophical

art criticism. The aim of this article is to re-

examine Kuspit’s writings from the 1970s and

early 1980s, in order to retrace his emergence

as a prominent figure from the New York

School.

David Craven

Art & Art History Department

MSC04 2560

1 University of New Mexico

Albuquerque

NM 87131-000 USA

E-mail: dcraven@unm.edu

42 D A V I D C R A V E N

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