Art's Prospect

Roger Kimball's incisive essays examine the art world from a fresh, skeptical perspective. From Gauguin and the Pre-Raphaelites to the latest exercises in artistic absurdity, Kimball's keen eye and lucid prose makes for bracing, entertaining reading. He sets himself dead against the shallow rhetoric and celebrity/money culture of the contemporary art world, breathing new excitement into debates over what we value in art and why. Art's Prospect is savage and hilarious in debunking chalatanism, but at the same time informed and insightful in revealing the best of contemporary art. Whether he is meditating on the concept of kitsch in the Pre-Raphaelites, the cultural pathology that has led critics to compare Gilbert and George's preposterous images with the Isenheim altarpiece, or the genius of such disparate painters as Paul Gauguin and Richard Diebenkorn, Kimball proves himself to be one of the liveliest critical minds in the art world today.