"The most influential art critic on the West Coast . . . indispensable reading for the informed art world."

     —ARTnews

Christopher Knight is the unprecedented five-time winner of the Chemical Bank Award for Distinguished Newspaper Art Criticism, and was a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in criticism. Writing first for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and now for the Los Angeles Times, Knight has developed a new journalistic approach to American art and culture, in which a radical defense of images stands alongside an incisive critique of cultural institutions. Among the 129 essays and reviews collected here are individual writings on internationally important historical figures, such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Tung Ch'i Ch'ang, and Édouard Manet; contemporary American masters like Edward Ruscha and Mike Kelley; and significant artists virtually forgotten today, such as California's Henrietta Shore and Mexico's Hermenegildo Bustos. Articles address politically motivated attacks on the NEA; the sculpture commissioned as the Vietnam Women's Memorial; Ariana Huffington's cynical biography of Picasso; the emergence of Los Angeles, birthplace of America's distinctive suburban sprawl, as a cultural powerhouse; the criticism of Time magazine's Robert Hughes and The New Criterion's Hilton Kramer; and a wide variety of museum exhibitions, both large and small.

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