The art world has become a point of contention within a range of debates and yet, strangely enough, while art criticism has been discussed at length, very little is said about art critics. Following in the footsteps of Lionello Venturi’s History of Art Criticism, in the current volume Lorente provides an updated reassessment of the great art critics from the Enlightenment down to the turn of the millennium. Conceived as a didactic handbook with a recommended bibliography at the end of each chapter, this concise work tells the history of a profession in permanent crisis, while also paying homage to its most infl uential practitioners in different cultural contexts.
J. Pedro Lorente is Professor of Art History at the University of Saragossa (Spain), where he leads the Aragonese Observatory of Art in the Public Sphere research group. He is director of the journal AACADigital, member of the Board of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the author of internationally recognized books such as The Museums of Contemporary Art: Notion and Development (published in Spanish, French, Turkish and English) and Public Art and Museums in Cultural Districts (available in both Spanish and English).