Appreciation …

… The Penetrating Gaze of One of America’s Most Brilliant Art Critics - The New York Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

His specialty is the searching, summative essay of a few pages on a single artist. (Spearing “that little eel in the middle — that marrow,” as Virginia Woolf wrote.) Journalism may have imposed the format upon him, but it’s also, by happy chance, the ideal medium for his gifts. Like Lydia Davis, he writes with remarkable tensile beauty and closeness of observation. Any dilation of either’s work tends to diminish it.