• Blogging Fellows, Essay, Feature, First Person, Music, Trains in the Basement
Snow in the Concert Hall
• Art and Mind, Blogging Fellows, Feature, In-Depth, Visual Art
Between Parlors and Oceans
• Appreciation, Feature, In-Depth, Poetry
Victim of his own intent: On Alvin Feinman
• Essay, Feature, First Person, Literature, Visual Art
An Itch for Things Remote
Aesthetics
When the Bug is the Feature
• Blogging Fellows, The Art of Thinking, Visual Art
Glitch artists remind us that the limit of the quantification of art is the banal. ...
Read More →How To Objectively Identify Beauty
• Blogging Fellows, Performance, The Art of Thinking
A philosopher explains the importance of form and freedom in aesthetics, juggling included. ...
Read More →Can Sports Be an Aesthetic Experience?
• Blogging Fellows, The Art of Thinking
Contingency and unpredictability can elevate a football game into a kind of theater....
Read More →What Does Platonic Form Have to Do with Art?
• Blogging Fellows, In-Depth, The Art of Thinking, Visual Art
Photographs stage a confrontation between the idea of an object and its representation, and...
Read More →Art Is Essential
In March 2020 Critical Read began the Art Is Essential flash nonfiction project. We asked writers to describe the art that they are turning to during these uncertain times. Since then, we’ve heard from over 300 writers across the country.
– Adam Zucker on Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation
...art invites us into lives beyond our own time and place. #ArtIsEssential
Isolation can drain us but art offers nourishment. #ArtIsEssential
We all deserve to take a moment to draw free breath, and then raise a hopeful cry for a better tomorrow. #ArtIsEssential
We may console ourselves that our isolation -however long, however uncertain- will also contain its treasures. #ArtIsEssential
Art In-Depth
Winnowing The Wynn
• Blogging Fellows, Dicey, Public Art, Reported
Art has history
Online since 2016, Critical Read is a nonprofit, non-partisan publisher dedicated to making American art and art history more inclusive and discoverable.
We tell the true stories of the fine, literary, and performing arts.

First Person Stories
Family Portrait
• Essay, First Person, Visual Art
Portraits of distant relatives survive a married couple's home reorganization, the subjects'...
Read More →The Monster Within
• Art and Mind, Blogging Fellows, First Person, Visual Art
Psychiatrist and art critic Deborah Kostianovsky explains why she can't turn away from a portrait...
Read More →Snow in the Concert Hall
• Blogging Fellows, Essay, Feature, First Person, Music, Trains in the Basement
Composers John Cage and R. Murray Schafer sculpt sound into moments that evade on-demand...
Read More →Greenhouse in the Desert
• Blogging Fellows, First Person, Performance, Trains in the Basement
"If you revisit the things that once interested you, you can return to that period of your life....
Read More →Graphite Insomnia
• Appreciation, First Person, Visual Art
“A deep black square can be an object or an opening. Sometimes you can get a surface so deep,...
Read More →Trending
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Seventeen Ways of Looking at the Mona Lisa We asked writers and artists to show us what the…
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Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico Lessons from a master in living with beauty: Georgia O’Keeffe’s…
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Family Portrait Portraits of distant relatives survive a married couple's home reorganization,…
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Winnowing The Wynn A critic surveys the Wynn Las Vegas art holdings and…
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How to Tell a Dance on Film Elliot Caplan and Mirra Bank watch dance with eyes and…
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The Lewis Chessmen, Deer Antler, and a French Bulldog "What could I make with antler?" I recalled the Lewis…
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Walls Covered in Basquiat "What might be if he lived? What does it mean…
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To Bobby, With Love The last single person among her friends, a young woman…
How a 19th-Century Idea Could Rescue 21st-Century Art
• Commentary, Reported, Visual Art
The American Art-Union offers a model for supporting artists with direct engagement from the ...
Read More →