Andrianna Campbell
Though Adrianna Campbell is still working towards her doctorate in the Department of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, she somehow finds time to pen catalogue essays for MoMA and write columns for Artforum. Her thesis pertains to Norman Lewis and the Abstract Expressionists of the mid-twentieth century, but for various publications she’s written about contemporary artists from Nari Ward to Laurie Simmons.

Jason Farago
Jason Farago is the co-founder of Even Magazine, which explicitly states on its website: “We’re tired of hearing about culture as elite, opaque, and unapproachable.” Us too! We turn to Even for snarky design commentary, one-offs from today’s most formidable voices, and long-form articles that explore the intersection of aesthetics and politics. It’s a gorgeous magazine, and they throw great events. Often, there’s free wine. Beyond that, Farago is creating a platform to give writers free-reign on the page to explore whatever they feel most passionate about.

Carolina Miranda
Lest you forget that culture exists on the West Coast, Carolina Miranda focuses exclusively on California art, architecture, and film. She’s not afraid of more sordid topics: this past July, she wrote about the end of pornography theaters for the Los Angeles Times. A staff writer for the publication, she recently won the prestigious Rabkin Prize for her work (Farago, above, is another 2017 grantee).

Jerry Saltz
Even if you don’t listen to us, listen to the Pulitzer Prizes. Jerry Saltz just won the esteemed award for his criticism at New York Magazine, “for a robust body of work that conveyed a canny and often daring perspective on visual art in America, encompassing the personal, the political, the pure and the profane.” In more pedestrian terms, Saltz doesn’t pull any punches.

Peter Schjeldahl
Peter Schjeldahl began his writing career as a poet and a follower of such New York School greats as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and the rest of their crowd. He eventually turned his focus to art writing and settled into a career-making position at The Village Voice in 1990. In 1998, he became The New Yorker’s art critic and cemented his legacy. Throughout his books and articles he maintains a lyrical, approachable style.

Martha Schwendener
Yale Art School Dean Robert Storr doesn’t like a lot of critics. But he’s a fan of Martha Schwendener. As a New York Times art critic, she finds favor with both the ivory tower and the rest of us. Within the past few years, she’s focused her writing on social practice and community initiatives, overlooked artists, non-commercial ventures and activism.

Sebastian Smee
Pulitzer Prize winner Sebastian Smee didn’t need a New York or London platform to make a name for himself. Working at The Boston Globe, he offered opinions on happenings both local (a planned renovation at the city’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and national (an Edward Hopper exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art).

Lucy Lippard
From the start of her career, Lucy Lippard was critical of the division between art and earthly concerns. Unlike Greenberg and Rosenberg, her interests lay in unpacking the larger social context in which artworks were produced. In 1977, she co-founded the feminist art journal Heresies. For Lippard, art and activism could be linked. The collective of women artists who contributed to the journal—a group that included Joan Snyder, Miriam Schapiro, and Pat Steir—frequently addressed female representation in its pages.

Rosalind Krauss
Prominent editor and scholar Rosalind Krauss was propelled to art world notoriety in 1974, when she published an article in Art in America taking to task the imperious critic Clement Greenberg for mishandling the estate of sculptor David Smith. Krauss was making a name for herself as a proponent of the burgeoning Minimalist scene (she once wrote an entire essay on how to explain Richard Serra to the French). In 1976, she co-founded October, an influential, theory-heavy journal that introduced the dense post-structuralist ideas of French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to American art audiences.

Boris Groys
Boris Groys is an art critic, philosopher and media theorist currently working as a Professor at New York University and as a Fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. Known for his re-evaluation of Socialist art , Groys is an influential thinker who published several books among which are The Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960-1990, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Dream Factory Communism, The Total Art of Stalinism, and Art Power. Groys said:
Criticism of socialism actually affirms socialism, which means the critique saves what is criticized, by attributing merit to it, in fact, because I will only criticize that which seems valuable, worthy and fateful to me, as Nietzsche said.

James Elkins
James Elkins is among the most prolific writers in the art world. His texts range in topics from histories and theories of images in art, but also science and nature. He writes mostly about fine art, and has published several books on this topic, including What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, What Happened to Art Criticism? ,and Art Critiques: A Guide.
In writing about art criticism Elkins states that “art criticism is in worldwide crisis, [it is] diaphanous … like a veil, floating in the breeze of cultural conversations and never quite settling anywhere… critics have begun to avoid judgments altogether, preferring to describe or evoke the art rather than say what they think of it.”

David Hickey
Over the years David Hickey wrote for many American publications including Art News, Harper's Magazine, Artforum, Rolling Stone, Art in America, and Vanity Fair. His nicknames are - the bad boy of art criticism, and the enfant terrible of art criticism. He worked as a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and as a Distinguished Professor of Criticism in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico.
In 2001 he was awarded the Genius award for his cultural criticism which has been collected in two books, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Pirates and Farmers. As he explains, he never looks at art, but waits for art to, a sort of, hits him.

Rosalind E. Krauss
Rosalind E. Krauss works at Columbia University and is known for her works on 20th century painting, sculpture and photography. Since 1965 she has published regularly in Artforum, Art in America and Art International. She also worked as an associate editor of Artforum, and has been an editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory she co-founded in 1976. She wrote about Jackson Pollock and has recently come into focus for her strong opposition to the formation of visual studies and visual culture as a new discipline.

Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard is internationally acclaimed art critic, curator, activist and writer, who is among the first authors who wrote about dematerialization of an artwork in conceptual art. She is also an active feminist who explored feminist art in her work, and has written over 20 books on contemporary art. Among the texts she wrote are criticism for are Z Magazine, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Art in America.

Roberta Smith
Roberta Smith is an American lecturer on contemporary art and an art critic for the New York Times. She writes about visual arts in general, including decorative arts, design, architecture, and popular and outsider art. She has written numerous essays for monographs and catalogues on contemporary artists as well. In 2003 she was awarded with Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism by College Art Association.

Rebecca Solnit
Coming from America, Rebecca Solnit writes on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. She is also a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. Her texts have appeared in numerous publications in print and online, and she also authored seventeen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogues and anthologies.
In her writings on art Solnit points out that much of the contemporary commentary on art and culture is a “kind of aggression against the slipperiness of the work and the ambiguities of the artist’s intent”, and “a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable.” Instead of this form of aggressiveness she proposes an alternative in her book Men Explain Things To Me, which she names as counter-criticism.

Eleanor Heartney
A New York based author Eleanor Heartney is a contributing editor for Art in America, but has also written extensively for other publications such as The New Art Examiner, Washington Post, Artnews, and the New York Times. She also authored several books, including Art and Now, Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order, Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads, and co-authored The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium.
Among her influential shorter pieces Out of the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibility and the Art Critic from 1996 stands out. Although written over two decades ago, this text, which examines the role of art critics in a situation when “cultural conservatives…reshape society into a form that greatly weakens the open exchange of ideas and the freedom of opportunity essential to a vital culture” seems more pertinent than ever.