‘Art-writing’ is intended to suggest an amorphously diverse field of activities no longer reducible to the practice of ‘criticism’ in its traditional sense, the narrative of which goes: critic visits gallery, looks at paintings, decides if they are any good and writes a review trying to say why. Evaluation in that sense, as Fried observed in the mid-1960s, was on the way out – though, of course, it continues to be practised by some. But the leading critics of so-called Late Modernism (and 1980s ‘classic’ postmodernism, for that matter), though a few remain active, belong to a generation now several decades older than the great majority of artists they might be asked, or decide themselves, to write about. This is a profound schism. Arguably, something unpalatably called ‘art theory’ has replaced criticism in quantitative terms, illustrating, among other things, the academic transformation and occupation of a domain once dominated by amateur or ‘jobbing’ males like Greenberg and Fried – the latter himself giving up on contemporary art and emigrating into the academia at the end of the 1960s.

-Jonathan Harris Art, Money, Parties, p 24